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

This article provides an integrative review of employee homesickness, defined as a complex cognitive-motivational-emotional state centered on missing family, friends, and the physical home environment, particularly in the context of job-related relocation. It synthesizes 70 empirical studies across multiple disciplines to clarify homesickness’s antecedents, consequences, underlying mechanisms, and moderating influences, distinguishing it from related constructs such as nostalgia, loneliness, relocation stress syndrome, and rootlessness. The review integrates Fisher’s homesickness model with Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, framing homesickness as a resource loss experience that affects employees’ health, well-being, and work outcomes, while highlighting the role of individual, organizational, and environmental factors in mitigating or exacerbating its effects. The authors emphasize the need for longitudinal and multi-source research designs, improved measurement consistency, and exploration of homesickness’s crossover effects on coworkers, proposing a comprehensive agenda for future research to better support relocated employees and organizations in a globalized workforce.