How is social capital formed and leveraged in international careers? A systematic review and future research directions

Abstract

The social capital that employees form on international assignments can have important implications for organizational outcomes. However, despite valuable prior research efforts, how and under which conditions international employees’ social capital is formed and translated into benefits for individuals and organizations remains unclear. To address this shortcoming, we employ a systematic literature review methodology and analyze papers on social capital in international careers published in peer-reviewed journals between 1973 and 2022. We integrate our findings into a framework that depicts the micro-, meso-, and macrolevel antecedents that influence the formation of social capital and describe the functional and dimensional features constituting international employees’ (IEs’) social capital. Our review thus outlines how IEs’ social capital is translated into individual and organizational outcomes as well as how it is contingent on several conditions. Based on our proposed framework, we conclude this paper with several suggestions for future research as well as certain practical suggestions for organizations.

How do German and French expatriates develop social networks?

“…Third, our empirical study highlights the relevance of our theoretical framework, which is based on social capital (Bourdieu, 1986) and social networks (Burt et al, 2000;Granovetter, 1973), for analysing the development of social networks by German and French expatriates (Walther, 2014). We further show that the combination of the societal (Maurice et al, 1982(Maurice et al, , 1992 and cultural (d'Iribarne et al, 2020) approaches can enrich context-sensitive research on expatriation (Mello et al, 2023) and deepen our understanding of home country effects on social network development (Mathey et al, 2023).…”

“…, 2020) approaches can enrich context-sensitive research on expatriation (Mello et al. , 2023) and deepen our understanding of home country effects on social network development (Mathey et al. , 2023).…”