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Fostering overseas success: A meta-analysis 111 1999; Littrell, 2007), but it is unclear to what extent each fulfills its purpose based on our current results. Third, the relationship between expatriates and their subordinates seems completely neglected in contemporary literature. A large part of international assignments occurs in order to fill managerial positions abroad (30%; BGRS, 2016) and we propose that expatriates may receive assistance and information from their overseas subordinates similar to that received from any other organizational agent. Subordinates’ assistance may, for instance, be helpful in learning cultural norms and adjusting to management responsibilities in a cross-cultural setting. However, neither the type of support offered by subordinates nor their overall willingness to support expatriate managers has been examined as of yet. Fourth, it is worth considering how agents and types of social support may act as substitutes or complements. Future research could examine more closely what type of resources are provided by different agents (e.g., emotional, informational, or instrumental). Some agents may be able to provide more or less unique resources, such as the feedback of supervisors or the affection of spouses, allowing them to fulfill roles that are critical to the assignment success. Other social support can be offered by various agents, if not simultaneously, hereby causing substitution or complementary effects. Career support or task assistance can for instance be offered by supervisors, mentors, and peers, and anyone in an expatriate’s social network may offer friendship or general information. Although our data format did not allow the testing of such hypotheses, future research should seek to examine the unique, substitutional, and complementary effects of social resources and their relative importance to expatriates. Such insights could be quite valuable in designing adjustment and socialization programs that optimize the international assignment experience. A first step would be to establish to what extent different agents provide emotional, informational, and instrumental resources. Fifth, in an increasingly globally connected world, the ways in which expatriates seek and receive social support may change rapidly. Virtual means of interactions negate physical distance and international travel becomes easier and cheaper by the year. Future research on social support should examine to what extent technological developments change the way in which expatriates gather and maintain their social resources. Although digital communication and cooperation programs, such as live video feeds and cloud services, facilitate global operations, the social interactions they imply are of a different, potentially less emotional nature. Nevertheless, these communication channels are becoming a larger part of day-to-day jobs. Simultaneously, expatriates experience less daily support in non-work domains because of the shift towards more global commuting, frequent business travelling, and split-family arrangements (BGRS, 2016). Research should examine to what extent family ties suffer from such assignments and whether expatriates experience social support from peers when working in virtual teams and on the cloud. Sixth, previous meta-analyses found that social support in domestic settings correlates .00 to .30 with performance, .20 to .70 with commitment, and -.20 to -.50 with turnover and withdrawal respectively (Chiaburu & Harrison, 2008; Kurtessis et al., 2017;

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