Social support is a common way for organizations to integrate their international staff who have relocated to a foreign location for work-related purposes. Despite a large body of research showing that social support leads to numerous positive outcomes among international staff, there are still significant gaps in our understanding of how particular sources of social support influence outcomes that are important both for expatriate employees themselves and for their employers. We engage with this issue by examining how different types of social support operate among foreign academics, building on a combination of anxiety / uncertainty management theory, job characteristics model, and organizational self-enhancement theory. Empirically, we surveyed 496 foreign academics working in 18 different universities in three Nordic countries. We examined the relationships between different types of social support, the mediating mechanisms of organization-based self-esteem and job clarity, and several outcomes. Our analysis shows that supervisor support and its effects are largely workplace-focused and are positively associated with work-related adjustment, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction, whereas coworkers’ support is more potent in affecting nonwork-related matters and through that is positively associated with work-related adjustment. We further find that organization-based self-esteem partially mediates the positive and significant effects for both sources of social support. Job clarity partially mediates only the relationships between supervisor’s social support and the work outcomes, whereas the effects of coworkers’ social support are not mediated.
