Top Management Team Characteristics On Internationalization Strategy

On condition of economic globalization and international competing market, allotting resource on a global scale and finding opportunities become a crucial problem to Chinese companies on the current situation. Researches about guiding enterprises carrying out international strategy are a hot topic of management study. The traditional studies are mostly based on resource-based view, transaction cost theory, institutional economic theory and etc. They prefer to find explanations from the objective factors inside and outside of the company and fail to take the irrational factors which often play a role in the strategic decision into consideration. Basing on upper echelons theory and attention-based view, this paper particularly discusses the important role TMT plays in the formulation and implement of international strategy. The advantage of this paper over the previous studies is introducing two parameters, TMT attention and managerial discretion into model to test the intermediating role of TMT attention and the moderate role of managerial discretion. The TMT attention is measured with automated text analysis method. The result this paper draws shows TMT attention on oversea resources increases as TMT has longer position tenure, higher education or richer output background. The high attention on oversea resources is good for the formulation and implement of international strategy thus we can draw the conclusion that TMT attention on oversea resource plays an intermediate role between TMT character and enterprise international strategy. But it shows there’s little relationship between the age of TMT and international strategy while the hypothesis between TMT tenure and international strategy is opposite to original one. The result shows managerial discretion plays a moderate role between TMT attention and international strategy. This means the possibility of turn TMT attention on overseas resource into international strategy increases as the managerial discretion increases, and vice versa. By introducing attention, this paper extends the upper echelons theory and its explanation on enterprise behavior and unfolds the black box of effects TMT characters have on strategic decision. The findings would be a guideline to the practice of international strategy of Chinese enterprises.