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Chapter 5 112 Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002; Riggle, Edmonson, & Hansen, 2009). Because the stressful conditions of international assignment would enhance employees’ reliance on social support (Viswesvaran et al., 1999), we had expected to find relationships equal to or stronger than those in domestic settings. Indeed, the impact of social support on performance reached the upper bound of what has been found in domestic contexts (e.g., Chiaburu & Harrison, 2008), but effects on commitment and retention were lower than expected. We set out to account for the actual hardship experienced in the different samples, but this was not documented adequately in the majority of studies. Future research should examine to what extent hardship is actually experienced in different international assignment contexts, and how hardship affects the value of social support. We expect that expatriates’ may have a higher need for informational, emotional, and instrumental resources during, for instance, split-family arrangements, commuting schemes, offshore postings, in terrorism-endangered countries, or under conditions of extreme cultural differences. 5.6.5 Practical Implications Several implications for practice emerge from our meta-analysis. First of all, our meta-analysis demonstrates that organizations should focus on providing the right career opportunities to counter the issue of international talent retention. Long-term career and succession planning for expatriates is put forward as most influential of expatriates’ commitment and retention in our results, yet scholars suggest that organizations put too little effort into specifically these elements (Kraimer, Shaffer, & Bolino, 2009; Lazarova & Cerdin, 2007; Pattie, White, & Tansky, 2010). The recent rise of strategic workforce planning tools (Angrave et al., 2016; Davenport, Harris, & Shapiro, 2010) should allow organizations to plan ahead and make sure a new assignment or a home position that fits the developed capabilities is available for repatriates. Second, our findings underline the crucial support function family members fulfill during expatriation. Organizations are wise to be generous in supporting families and spouses in the overseas adjustment process. However, frequent business travelling, overseas commuters, and split family arrangements are becoming ever more common because of the cost-savings they imply on the short term (BGRS, 2015, 2016; McNulty, 2015). These cost-efficiencies could have negative implications in the long term. Theymay seriously damage expatriates’ support networks, causing decreases in well-being and the rise of work-family interferences that harm both the assignee and the assignment. With time, this could result in decreased productivity, long-term absence, and dysfunctional turnover. Hence, organizations turning to these alternative means of expatriation should take their social responsibility and facilitate ongoing, honest discussion with expatriates regarding their families’ well-being and work-life balance. Finally, although cross-cultural training and social club memberships remain standard practice in most organizations (BGRS, 2015; Cole & Nesbeth, 2014), our results suggest they are inefficient. CCT only related to small improvements in expatriates’ commitment and adjustment, in line with a previous meta-analysis (Morris & Robie, 2001), but did not improve behavioral outcomes such as performance and retention. Moreover, its heterogeneous effect sizes suggest that moderating effects exist. We advise