Acculturation of Highly-qualified Migrants: Individual Coping Strategies and Climate for Inclusion

The aim of this paper is to offer a comprehensive taxonomy of the coping strategies used by highly-qualified migrants (HQMs), and to shed light on how features of organizational climate for inclusion (CI) facilitate or constrain their integration. Based on 57 interviews with HQMs, we identified 42 different coping strategies they used to adjust to work environment. While our study supports the argument that the use of problem-focused coping strategies is beneficial for improving the integration of HQMs, our findings further reveal that emotion-focused coping processes are highly functional. HQMs often develop a range of emotion-based strategies that sustain positive affect and serve to reaffirm their sense of self-worth and self-efficacy, which in turn facilitates integration into the workplace.