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Expatriate support and success: A systematic review 85 responsible for the direct implementation of POS (Ng & Sorensen, 2008; Rhoades & Eisenberger, 2002). If the supportive signals of supervisors and organizations are congruent, this may enhance the supportive climate that expatriates perceive. However, a synergetic effect between only PSS and parent POS existed in Liu and Ipe’s (2010) study, and not with subsidiary POS. This is peculiar, as the three support sources may be expected to contribute to the same supportive climate. Unfortunately, Liu and Ipe (2010) did not report the location of the supporting supervisor or whether it concerned expatriates’ perceptions of home supervisor support in particular, which would have explained why only interactions with parent POS were found. Future studies might examine to what extent supervisors and organizations in the home and host countries contribute to the same supportive climate(s). Furthermore, as PSS and POS have unique as well as similar effects on success (see Kraimer &Wayne, 2004; Kraimer et al., 2001; Liu & Ipe, 2010), future research could examine to what extent these sources provide different and similar resources. This review did not find conclusive results regarding the support of co-workers and mentors, but this may be attributed to the situational and cultural proximity of these sources. For example, it has been argued that HCN co-workers provide unique informational resources that stimulate the adjustment process, whereas expatriates’ relationships with comparable others (i.e., expatriate co-workers) may, in particular, offer emotional resources due to their similar situational context and/or similar cultural background (Adelman, 1988; Caligiuri & Lazarova, 2002; Van Bakel et al., 2015). It has already been demonstrated that support from these specific co-worker groups has differential effects on the success of IAs (e.g., Johnson et al., 2003). Similarly, it has been suggested that the cultural proximity of mentors and their protégés influences the content and value of their interactions (Feldman & Bolino, 1999). Future studies should examine to what extent (previous) employment status and cultural proximity affect the value of supportive interactions. Finally, this review suggests that factors other than proximity influence the effectiveness of social support in general. First, social support was found to contribute more to IA success criteria under conditions of enhanced hardship. This includes conditions characterized by local resistance (Shen & Jiang, 2015), role ambiguity (Kawai & Mohr, 2015) or political and social instability (Bader et al., 2015). Second, it seems that the effectiveness of social support may depend on the personal characteristics of expatriates, such as their cross-cultural motivation (Chen et al., 2010), the extent to which they identify with the organization (Showail et al., 2013) or their personal initiative (Stroppa & Spieß, 2011). Third, as stated above, some sources of social support have synergetic effects (Takeuchi et al., 2009; Liu & Ipe, 2010) whereas others seem to complement or even substitute for each other (Cao et al., 2014; De Paul Chism, 2014; Kraimer & Wayne, 2004; Shen & Jiang, 2015; Stroppa & Spieß, 2011). Future research should examine more broadly which factors moderate the effectiveness of social support and how they do so. Best practices might exist in terms of types and forms of support that always produce effects and that should consequently be provided on each assignment. Other supportive interventions might only provide a return on investment under certain