Expatriate Development For Cross-Cultural Adjustment:Effects Of Social Support And Moderator Role

As a company grows bigger and begins to internationalize,it would send its employees overseas for international operations.The employees sent overseas are called expatriates.Such a huge group deserves our attention and their cross-cultural adjustment should not be neglected.This thesis takes the cross-cultural adjustment of Chinese expatriates who have taken the international assignments as the research subjects.Based on the retrospect and summarization of previous studies on crosscultural adjustment both home and abroad,this thesis analyzes the current status of cross-cultural adjustment of Chinese expatriates in Intel China.Then,through Colleen Ward's two dimensions of adjustment theory and model as the theoretical framework,it is to present research measure and evaluates the expatriate adjustment from both psychological and sociocultural aspects.The author chooses social support as the predictor and validate the relationship between social support and psychological and sociocultural adjustment.The previous study only validates the positive relationship between social support and psychological adjustment.The study also chooses personality and language proficiency as moderators which can influence the relationship between social support and adjustment.It is to test the hypotheses of the correlation between social support and psychological and sociocultural adjustment.The results show that: firstly,social support is positively correlated with both psychological and sociocultural adjustment.Second,personality traits play a moderator effect in the relationship between social support and expatriate adjustment,whereas language proficiency plays no moderator effect in the relationship between social support and expatriate adjustment.Third,the social support from organization,especially the cross-cultural training has a positive significance on both psychological and sociocultural adjustment.