Heartsick for Home: An Integrative Review of Employee Homesickness and an Agenda for Future Research

Homesickness is a common experience for employees who move for a job. We provide an integrative review of the literature on employee homesickness to offer four main contributions. First, we undertake a state-of-the-art review that integrates the disparate literature on homesickness, focusing on its antecedents, consequences, underlying mechanisms, and moderating influences. Second, we clarify the concept of homesickness and differentiate it from neighboring concepts to advance theory development and facilitate its measurement. Third, we integrate Conservation of Resources theory with the homesickness model to provide robust and parsimonious theoretical accounts relating homesickness to its antecedents and outcomes. Finally, we use this integrative framework to generate a promising agenda for future research, thus forging meaningful connections to other domains and stimulating theoretical and empirical advancements.