The issue of employee adaptation in an international work environment matches the scope of human resource management on international markets. In recent years, international aspects of HRM have been gaining in importance, enjoying growing interest of both theoreticians and practitioners of management.

As a result of globalization, growing possibilities created by new technologies, generation of intellectual capital as a source of competitive advantage or finally, the need to operate under the conditions of continuous changes, international human resource management has become one of the most important challenges to be faced by contemporary organizations. In order to meet them, organizations more and more often opt for hiring employees from different cultural circles or for delegating expatriates to subordinate foreign entities. At the same time, employees themselves more and more often show initiative in searching for job outside their country of origin. Thus, international companies need employees who easily adapt to new cultures, are able to work effectively in multicultural teams and communicate in many languages.

This is why one of challenges faced by contemporary organizations is proper design, implementation and execution of the adaptation process, often also defined using synonyms such as introduction to organization, incorporation, implementation, adjustment or on-boarding.

Within the framework of the executed project attention was also paid to what was happening with employees in the further work process (change of positions, participation in projects, reconfiguration of teams, preparation for the process of leaving a company with a diverse work environment).

During the research, it was assumed that the process of employee adaptation in an international work environment was determined by 3 groups of factors:

• individual dimension (characteristics of an employee)
• characteristics of an organization (organizational policies and practices with regard to adaptation)
• characteristics of the environment (context of work performance, its placement in the business sphere).

Distinguishing these three aspects is a starting point for developing a theoretical model of the conditions of the adaptation process, taking account also of the social and professional dimension of employee adaptation as well as the level of work environment internationalization in an organization where the employee adaptation process is executed.