| Along with the "Go global" and recently raised "One Belt and One Road" strategy,Chinese multinationals are reaching out worldwide in a rapid manner.Armed with international expansion,Chinese multinationals acquiring more and more strategic asset and advanced technologies.However,born in a latecomer country,they generally have limited absorptive capacity.Can rapid internationalization bring about significant improvement of innovation and performance as expected?Discussing this issue attaches great significance for guiding Chinese multinationals in how to choose reasonable internationalization pace to influence their innovation performance.Multinationals can establish stable host country network and improve access to qualified talents and technologies by establishing foreign subsidiaries.The complementary knowledge gained by these subsidiaries is transferred to the parent company through internal networks,which is beneficial to the improvement of parent firms’ innovation performance.Previous literature on the relationship between international expansion(IE)and innovation performance(IP)results in mixed finding,such as positive,negative,non-linear or not significant,because of the analytic units and contexts difference.It is necessary to further explore the relationship between them.At the same time,researchers in internationalization process put more emphasis on the static characteristics,such as degree(extent),scope and entry mode.Only a few of them take dynamic ones into consideration.Therefore,it attaches high theoretical significance to introduce the temporal dimensions,such as speed and rhythm,into IE-IP research.Therefore,from knowledge-based view and organizational learning perspective,this study integrates upper echelon framework and focuses on the core issue of "how the temporal dimension of internationalization pattern dynamically affects the parent firms’ innovation performance".And this study discusses three inter-related issues:(1)Whether the key temporal dimension characteristics of the internationalization process-internationalization speed and internationalization rhythm affect the innovation performance of parent firms of multinationals;(2)whether the relationship between internationalization speed and parent firms’ innovation performance will be affected by different internationalization rhythm;(3)How different levels of contextual factors will affect this relationship.By answering these three questions,we can better understand the influencing mechanism of temporal international expansion pattern on parent innovation performance.Fast speed of international expansions probably has both positive and negative impacts on parent innovation performance.Fast speed would benefit due to the enhancement of ’ first mover advantages ’ and ’inter-temporal economies of scope’on organizational learning.But it is not achievable by the Chinese firms with capability constraints.At the same time,fast speed leads to time compression diseconomies on knowledge absorption and learning,increasing innovation cost and hampering parents’innovation performance.On the other hand,irregular rhythm of international expansions might result in internal knowledge chaos and conflicts,breaking organizational learning routines,and inefficient knowledge exploration and exploitation,which are detrimental to parents’ innovation performance.On the basis of abovementioned core logics and hand-collected panel data during 2008-2014 of Chinese A-share listed firms having establishing foreign subsidiaries(a total of 1092 firm-year observations),the study employed the negative binomial regression,and empirically examined the three questions.(1)The first study paid attention to the separate impacts of internationalization speed and rhythm on the parents’ innovation performance,as well as the moderating role of host countries,in order to investigate the mechanism of temporal dimension of internationalization and the locational characteristics on it.The findings show that,speed and rhythm of international expansions both have negative impacts on parent innovation performance.As mentioned,fast speed and irregular rhythm both bring time compression economies to knowledge recognition,assimilation and transferring process,which harms parents,innovation capability and performance improvement.The geographic diversity of host countries in which a Chinese multinational’s portfolio of subsidiaries operates strengthens the negative relationship between speed and parent innovation performance,and average technology development of host country portfolio in which a Chinese multinational’s portfolio of subsidiaries operates could alleviate the negative influence of speed and rhythm.(2)On the basis of first study,the second study put forward the temporal pattern of internationalization on parents’ innovation performance,and systematically portrayed it by testing the moderating role of rhythm in the relationship between speed and parent innovation performance.On the other hand,internal resources and capabilities would provide more resource portfolios and knowledge base to attenuate the threats of time compression diseconomies.The fierce competition of industry environment puts forward higher requirements on the speed and quality of the firm’s learning through international expansion,and strengthens the dilemma of time compression diseconomies.In the second study,organizational slack,R&D spending and industry competitive intensity were introduced by examining three-way interaction.The results reveal,firstly,irregular expansion rhythm intensifies the negative impact of speed on parent innovation performance,which means fast but irregular internationalization pattern would exert stronger negative impact compared with fast and regular pattern.Secondly,the negative moderation effect would be mitigated with increasing organizational slacks,but be enhanced by high level of industry competitive intensity.(3)Parallel to the second,the third study focused on the role of top management team of multinationals,in order to explore moderating role of the diversity of top management team,which represent the important decision power and managerial resources.Diversity could enrich the team’s knowledge base and opinions and influence the team’s perceived opportunities and risks around different temporal internationalization patterns,as well as the strategic choices responding to environmental uncertainties.However,diversity also increases complexity of communication and coordination,leading the difficulty of subsidiary-parent knowledge transfer.The empirical outcomes present,tenure diversity and international experience diversity strengthen the negative moderating impact of internationalization rhythm on the speed-innovation performance relationship.However,functional diversity could attenuate the negative moderating effect of internationalization rhythm.Based on the abovementioned theoretical reasoning and empirical test,the study contributed to the international expansion literature and innovation literature in three ways.Firstly,by introducing the temporal dimension into the IE-IP relationship,the study took the dynamic characteristics of international process into consideration,enriched new dimension of international expansion’s impact on the parent innovation performance,and improved a better understanding of IE-IP relationship.Secondly,this study discussed influencing mechanisms of internationalization speed and rhythm on parents’ innovation performance,further delimiting the core concepts of temporal dimension of internationalization pattern.By examining the moderating role of rhythm on speed-innovation,the study emphasized the importance of composition of the temporal pattern of internationalization,which extend the research of temporal dimension.The introduction of innovation performance also enriched the explanatory power of temporal dimension.Thirdly,by looking at top management team diversity,this study integrated the upper echelon framework and internationalization framework,extended the circumstance of employing upper echelon perspective,and complemented previous gap that less attention was paid to the TMT as decision core in international process literature. |
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