An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Top Management Team Characteristics On The Enterprise Internationalization Speed

In recent years,although Chinese enterprises are “latecomers” to international operations,they have shown rapid international expansion in both international exports and foreign investment.The "radical" and "accelerated" internationalization process of Chinese enterprises has attracted worldwide attention,and at the same time,they are also facing huge challenges.According to CCPIT,the success rate of Chinese companies’ overseas investment has been only one third.In a global environment with increasing risks,Chinese companies need more professional international teams and pay more attention to international risk investigations.How to control the speed of internationalization and reduce unnecessary risks as much as possible becomes an important issue.Therefore,based on the rich research results of “degree of internationalization”,this paper introduces “speed of internationalization” and focus on the process of internationalization.At present,there are few researches on the preexplaining factors of internationalization speed.The impact on the internationalization speed is mainly discussed from the aspects of organizational structure,resources,innovation,system and others,lacking of consideration of the impact from international strategic decision-makers.Based on classic theories of Upper Echelon theory,attention-based theory and so on,this paper constructs an impact mechanism of internationalization speed from two levels of individual cognition and power structure,explains how the characteristics of top management team will influence the "radical" way of internationalization and how the power structure will have an effect on this mechanism.This paper takes the manufacturing companies listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2015 to 2017 as research samples,and uses Stata software to conduct an empirical test.The specific research content and main conclusions are as follows:(1)This paper studies the relationship between the characteristics of top management team and the internationalization speed of the company.The empirical test results show that the characteristics of top management team will significantly affect the internationalization speed of the enterprises.The older the top management team is,the slower the company’s internationalization speed;the longer the tenure of top management team,the slower the company’s internationalization speed;the higher educational level of top management team,the faster the company’s internationalization speed;the stronger the “output-oriented” professional background of top management team,the faster the company’s internationalization speed.Comparing the degree of influence of the four background characteristics on the company’s internationalization speed,the educational level and the “output-oriented” professional background of top management team have a greater impact.(2)This paper further examines the intermediary role of top management team’s attention to internationalization risk between the relationship of background characteristics and company’s internationalization speed,so as to study how the background characteristics affect company’s internationalization speed.The empirical results show that the attention to internationalization risk plays a mediating role in the relationships between educational background and company’s internationalization speed,the "output" professional background and company’s internationalization speed;but in the relationships between age,tenure and company’s internationalization speed not.(3)This paper introduces executive power to explore its regulating role in the relationship between attention to international risk and internationalization speed of enterprise.The empirical analysis results show that in the relationship the executive power plays a regulating role,which makes the negative relationship between international risk attention and internationalization speeds stronger.Compared with previous literature,there are three possible innovations in this paper:(1)Combined with background characteristics of top management team,this paper explores the differences in the internationalization speed of different enterprises from a micro perspective,which enriches the pre-explaining factors of internationalization speed.At present,there are few studies on the pre-explaining factors of internationalization speed,most of them start from the aspects of structure,resources,innovation and system.Therefore,this paper studies the impact of background characteristics on the internationalization speed,making up for the lack of research on the pre-explaining factors of internationalization speed.(2)Introduce the internationalization risk attention of top management team,and from the perspective of attention-based view reveal the internal mechanism of the impact that top management team’s characteristics have on the internationalization speed.In the previous research on Upper Rchelon theory,most scholars used characteristics of top management team as proxy variables for cognitive preference,and directly studied the influence of background characteristics of top management team on corporate behavior.But the research framework of Upper Echelon theory is "the characteristics of top management team-preferences and cognition-corporate behavior".Therefore,previous research based on demographic characteristics ignored the role of top management team’s preferences and cognition.In this paper,attention to internationalization risk is used as a proxy variable for cognition to study its intermediary role in the relationship between characteristics of top management team and company’s internationalization speed,which enriches the research results of Upper Echelon theory.(3)Introduce the adjustment variable of executive power to explore how and to what extent it influences the relationship between attention to internationalization risk and internationalization speed.When executive power is greater,it is more likely that the executive team will substantially translate its attention allocation into corporate internationalization strategy.This paper considers the impact of corporate power structure on the relationship between manager’s cognition and internationalization strategy of corporate,which enriches the relevant literature on the relationship between manager’s cognition and corporate internationalization strategy.