Background

Global teams are considered an emerging topic in the international management literature. Empirical studies conducted in this field include studies on trust, communication, team relationships, conflicts over distance and leadership. Also, the topic of employee relocation has been extensively researched in the international management literature. Despite the fact that relocations in global teams occur in practices, both topics have yet to be researched together. This paper intends to fill this research gap and study both topics together.

Aim

This paper aims to investigate the consequences of employee relocation in global teams using a multi-stakeholder perspective.

Methodology

A qualitative study was conducted with eight individuals working in the same global company which operates in the financial services industry and is headquartered in London, UK. Out of the eight participants, five worked in the same global team. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate the consequences of relocation in global teams from different perspectives.

Findings

A thematic analysis of the data revealed four main categories of relocation consequences that are acknowledged across the different stakeholders interviewed for this study: work redistribution, resource management, vulnerable team relationships and shift in communication. Despite a common acknowledgement of the consequences, the study showed that discrepancies between the stakeholders’ views on the consequences affected the way the team handled them. By contextualizing the results around a role, the multi-stakeholder perspective exposed different scopes of awareness on the impacts of the relocation consequences. This inferred that individuals showed a certain level of subjectivity influencing their scope of awareness on the impacts of the consequences of relocations.