The impact of international experience on individual-level outcomes: A meta-analysis

Abstract

This meta-analysis aggregates the insights of 202 studies on the relationships between international experience (IE) and a range of individual-level outcomes including cultural intelligence, cross-cultural adjustment, and work-related satisfaction, performance, and turnover intentions. We provide a conceptual framework to organize the literature, review and integrate existing research on IE-outcome links, explore the impact that different types of IE operationalization and measurement have on the direction and magnitude of effects, and establish the incremental predictive validity of IE beyond commonly used predictors, such as personality traits, general mental ability, and language proficiency. We find that effect sizes are generally small; however, subgroup analyses of different types of IE operationalization and measurement yield substantially larger effect sizes. Additionally, we show incremental predictive validity of IE for more proximal outcomes beyond a set of established predictors. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory development and measurement of IE and offer avenues for future research.