EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

All or nothing: ambivalent acculturation strategies and job satisfaction of bicultural migrants in South Korea

Jinxi Michelle Li, Fabian Jintae Froese and Julia Sophie Schmid

Asia Pacific Business Review, 2023, vol. 29, issue 3, 719-739

Abstract: Migrant workers play an important role in South Korea’s economic growth, yet their adjustment difficulties have often been problematic, leading to low job satisfaction. This study investigates the acculturation strategies and job satisfaction of migrant workers from the same country but of different cultural origins. Based on social identity theory, we argue that cultural origin affects acculturation strategies in that bicultural Korean-Chinese tend to enact more integration and assimilation strategies, while mono-cultural Han-Chinese workers enact more separation and marginalization strategies. Moreover, we argue that social support has a moderating effect on this relationship and moderates the indirect effect on job satisfaction. We tested our hypotheses on data from a survey of 351 Chinese workers (203 Korean-Chinese and 148 Han-Chinese). Findings show that Korean-Chinese enact assimilation strategies, and surprisingly, marginalization strategies more often than Han-Chinese workers. These findings suggest that Korean- Chinese are either fully assimilated into Korean society or completely left out. As expected, social support moderates the relationship between cultural origin and acculturation strategy, and the indirect relationships on job satisfaction, underlining the important role of social support.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13602381.2021.1983982 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:apbizr:v:29:y:2023:i:3:p:719-739

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FAPB20

DOI: 10.1080/13602381.2021.1983982

Access Statistics for this article

Asia Pacific Business Review is currently edited by Professor Chris Rowley and Malcolm Warner

More articles in Asia Pacific Business Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:apbizr:v:29:y:2023:i:3:p:719-739