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Chapter 5 90 Social support is recognized as an important factor for successful international assignment. However, to date, there is no overview of the agents that provide social support during the expatriation process and their influence on different criteria of expatriate success. We culminated findings of 84 independent studies that examined the social support provided by community-, work-, and family-domain agents in relation to four criteria of expatriate success: cross-cultural adjustment, commitment, performance, and retention. Our meta- analytical results demonstrated that the strength of the support-success relationship (ρ = .24 overall) depends on the supporting agent and success criterion under study. All social support, except for support by other expatriates, related positively to expatriate adjustment. Particularly overall perceptions of organizational support and supervisory support related to expatriates’ commitment. Support from each domain had equally positive relationships with expatriate performance but no significant relationships existed specifically with peer support, cross-cultural training, and adjustment-oriented organizational support. Support by spouses, supervisors, and organizations was related most positively to expatriates’ retention and, here, cross-cultural training and mentoring had no significant effect. We had expected that the effect of social support would differ due to the location and mobility status of agents, but such moderating effects were not found. We found support for our moderation hypothesis that social support related more strongly to proximal (i.e., adjustment, commitment) than to distal criteria (i.e., performance, retention). No evidence was found for rater effects or strong publication bias in expatriate management research.
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