With the rise of globalization, overseas assignments have greatly increased over the last several decades. In order to ensure a successful assignment, companies must understand how to select, train, and support globally competent employees. Through a systematic qualitative review, we provide a framework and best practices to integrate selection, training, and environmental variables in order to maximize adjustment. We highlight what influences an expatriate’s psychological and sociocultural adjustment and propose the underlying mechanisms that can play a role in the trainee characteristics-adjustment relationship. More specifically, learning serves as an explanatory variable, whereas training design and environmental variables can change the degree to which employee characteristics influence learning, and learning influences adjustment, respectively.
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