The Effect Of TMT International Experience On Firms’ International Speed

The internationalization of enterprises is an important part of the national participation in economic globalization and one of the ways for enterprises to compete internationally.With the Belt and Road initiative and the "Go Global" strategy in practice,Chinese enterprises,as the "latecomers" in international business,have been "fast" and "aggressive" in the international market.The "fast" and "aggressive" speed of internationalization is remarkable.However,the road to the internationalization of Chinese manufacturing enterprises is not smooth,most of them are not highly internationalized and are in the middle and low end of the global value chain.In order to successfully get out of the current dilemma,it is very necessary for manufacturing enterprises to explore a suitable internationalization path for themselves,in which top management plays an important role in the internationalization strategy of enterprises.Therefore,it is imperative to study how executives influence the speed of internationalization through their international experience and the level of risk-taking,and how management autonomy affects the speed of international expansion of an enterprise.This paper examines the above questions.Specifically,based on the upper echelon theory and resource-based theory,this paper structures a micro-foundation model of the internationalization speed of Chinese manufacturing firms at three levels: executives’ personal perceptions,risk-taking and management autonomy.By constructing an unbalanced panel data consisting of a total of 8,281 observations of A-share listed manufacturing internationalized firms from 2008 to 2020.This paper first proposes and tests a hypothesis on the effect of executives’ international experience on the speed of firm internationalization,and then explores its impact mechanism and conducts a robustness analysis of the results.Details are as follows.First,this article investigates the relationship between TMT international experience and the speed of firm internationalization.The results show that TMT international experience significantly advances the speed of firm internationalization.Specifically,both TMT international work experience and TMT international learning experience have a significant positive effect on the speed of firm internationalization,and TMT international work experience has a stronger effect on the speed of firm international expansion.In addition,robustness analysis and endogeneity tests are conducted in this paper,and the results are all consistent with the underlying regression results.Second,this paper further investigates how TMT international experience affects the speed of firm internationalization.The level of corporate risk-taking is introduced to explore its mediating role in the effect of TMT international experience on the speed of firm internationalization.The results show that the level of firm risk-taking plays a partially mediating role in the relationship between TMT international experience and the speed of corporate internationalization,and both TMT international work experience and TMT international learning experience pass the test.That is,in firms where executives have international experience,the international experience of executives can promote the speed of internationalization by increasing the risk-taking level of the firm.Third,this paper introduces management autonomy variables to explore the relationship between TMT international experience and firms’ internationalization speed under different degrees of freedom of rights,and to investigate the moderating effect of management autonomy on it.The empirical results show that: managerial autonomy moderates the relationship between TMT international experience and firms’ internationalization speed,and the positive relationship between TMT international(work and learning)experience and firms’ internationalization speed is stronger when organizational autonomy is greater;the positive relationship between TMT international experience and firms’ internationalization speed is stronger when institutional autonomy is greater.specifically,the role of TMT international work experience and learning experience is slightly differences: the effect of TMT international work experience on firms’ internationalization speed is significantly positive in non-SOEs,but not in SOEs;the effect of executive international learning experience on firms’ internationalization speed is significantly positive in SOEs,but not in non-SOEs.Compared with previous literature,this paper may be innovative in two aspects:In terms of research objects,first,the study of executives’ influence on firms’ business and investment behaviors is enriched by exploring their influence on the speed of firm internationalization based on a micro-cognitive perspective from TMT personal international experience.Previous studies on TMT international experience in corporate behavior have focused more on the fact that TMT international experience can improve corporate operating performance,innovation performance,and increase corporate exports,etc.Few pieces of literature have focused on the impact of executives’ international experience on the speed of corporate internationalization.Second,the small number of studies on the relationship between TMT international experience and firm internationalization do not further classify executives’ international experience,and few consider the impact of multiple experiences of TMT international work experience and TMT international learning experience.Regarding the research content,this paper introduces risk-taking into the research framework of the upper echelon theory,explores the path of the role of risk-taking in the relationship between TMT international experience and firms’ internationalization speed by studying the mediating and regulating mechanisms of TMT international experience and firms’ internationalization speed,reveals the mechanism black box and theoretical boundary of this causal chain,and enriches to a certain extent the economic efficiency research.