Ridderprint

Fostering overseas success: A meta-analysis 113 organizations to reconsider the value of CCT and those that desire to continue implementation should closely examine which configurations do and do not work. Similarly, no positive impact of interactions with other expatriates in non-work settings could be established. The effect on adjustment was insignificant and no other outcomes have been investigated in research (see Table 5.11 and Figure 5.3). If accelerated adjustment is the purpose of the expatriate club memberships organizations offer, our analyses suggest that interactions with HCN agents will be more effective. Moreover, isolation from HCN interactions via expatriate-only clubs, private schools, and closed compounds could even be harmful to the adjustment of expatriate families and thereby to assignment success. Organizations and scholars should team up to explore alternatives that expose expatriate families to interactions with the local community in a positive way. 5.6.6 Limitations This meta-analysis is subject to several limitations. First, meta-analytical findings are limited by the design, methods, and rigor of the original studies. For example, all but a single study (Chen, Kirkman, Kim, Fahr, & Tangirala, 2010) have used cross-sectional survey data instead of a preferred longitudinal design and this limits the causal inferences we can draw based on our results. Poor performing or withdrawing expatriates could very well receive less support from their social environment as a consequence of their performance and not vice versa. Similarly, expatriates may appreciate their supervisor or organization more upon receiving a high performance rating whereas adjusted expatriates may better bond with local agents. Although we demonstrated that rater effects and publication bias have not inflated effect sizes considerably, other factors may have had confounding effects. For example, previous international experiences, assignment hardship, or cross-cultural motivation may have influenced both the social support expatriates seek and receive as well as their attitudes to and behaviors in assignments. In light of this, the field of expatriate management research would benefit from more rigorous research designs. For example, longitudinal diary studies could be used to investigate how expatriates develop a host country social support network and how more/less established networks affect the different success criteria over time. Similarly, such designs may help to establish what types of support are most needed in the different phases of expatriation (e.g., career support around the end of the assignment). Quasi-experimental designs could be used to examine the effectiveness of global mobility practices. Organizations could cooperate and contribute data to a shared research project examining, for instance, the attitudes and behaviors of similar expatriates when paired with either host or home country mentors, after receiving different types of CCT, or with different allowance packages. Second, there are some methodological limitations related to the small number of independent samples and the chosen meta-analytical model for some analyses. We believe that the true effect of social support on success criteria in expatriate studies may vary from one study to the next as often employees from a specific parent country (e.g., Kraimer & Wayne, 2004), in a specific host country (e.g., Lui & Ipe, 2010), or in specific occupations are considered (e.g., De Paul & Bikos, 2015). Random effects models were hence more appropriate than fixed effect models, as they assume a distribution of true