Global employee mobility is a very important concern for multinational enterprises (MNEs), as such individuals are critical strategic human capital resources for MNEs. Ensuring that expatriates (one type of globally mobile employees) maintain high organizational commitment and assignment completion intentions (“attachment” to international posting) is a critical consideration for MNEs’ human resources management. However, we have a very limited understanding of how the configurations of structures (decentralization, formalization, and global knowledge integration) – practices set in place to control and coordinate foreign subsidiaries by MNEs – influence expatriates’ attachments during international assignments. We address this research question by adopting the structural contingency theory and extending it to examine the impact of structural configurations on expatriate managers’ outcomes. We develop and test a set of hypotheses using survey data obtained from 192 expatriate general managers employed by nine American global hotel chains. We find that these three structural characteristics create various configurations differing in their effectiveness in retaining expatriates’ attachment outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of examining configurations of structural characteristics, which underscores the difficulties of managing expatriate managers for MNEs as well as providing further insights into the complexities associated with structural configurations necessary to manage them well.

全球员工流动性是跨国企业 (MNE) 非常重要的一个问题，因为此类人员是跨国企业至关重要的战略人力资本资源。确保外籍员工（全球流动员工的一种）保持高度的组织承诺和完成任务的意愿（对国际职位的“依恋”）是跨国公司人力资源管理的一个重要考虑因素。然而，我们对结构配置（权力下放、正规化和全球知识整合）——跨国公司为控制和协调外国子公司而制定的做法——如何影响外派人员在国际任务期间的依恋关系的了解非常有限。我们通过采用结构权变理论并将其扩展以检验结构配置对外籍管理者结果的影响来解决这个研究问题。我们利用从 9 家美国全球连锁酒店雇用的 192 名外籍总经理那里获得的调查数据，提出并检验了一组假设。我们发现，这三种结构特征创造了各种配置，其在保留外籍人士依恋结果方面的有效性有所不同。我们的研究结果强调了检查结构特征配置的重要性，这强调了管理跨国企业外籍经理的困难，并提供了对与良好管理它们所需的结构配置相关的复杂性的进一步见解。