Research summary Drawing on the information-based imitation and information-processing perspectives, we examine how experience interpretation and assessment-and in particular its board-level microfoundations-affects the relationship between a firm's international experience and its decision to imitate the market leader's location choices. Our results show that the negative relationship between international experience and imitation of location choices is positively moderated by board turnover, board age, and board equity ownership but not influenced by board gender diversity. These findings advance our understanding of the interplay between information-based motives for imitation and firms' information processing and organizational learning. Specifically, we contribute to research on the effect of international experience on firms' mimetic behavior by pointing out the relevance of experience interpretation and assessment from a microfoundations perspective. Managerial summary Our study provides indications for executives attempting to predict competitors' global strategy. When it comes to location choices, we find that companies with less international experience are more likely to follow the market leader, while those internationally experienced are more likely to follow their own path. Moreover, lower board turnover, relatively younger directors, and smaller equity ownership can favor the articulation and exploitation of the lessons offered by prior international experiences, thus further reducing the company's inclination to imitate the leader's location choices. Firms seeking an independent path toward internationalization can therefore use corporate governance-and in particular board-level factors-to enhance their ability to interpret and assess their international experience.

Purpose The authors meta-analyze research on the diversification–performance relationship to empirically establish the impact of home-country formal institutional quality on this relationship. Prior research assumes that a country’s formal institutional quality negatively affects the diversification–performance relationship, especially when it involves unrelated diversification. However, empirical evidence for these propositions is inconclusive because existing studies consider blocks of countries with limited institutional heterogeneity. To provide more clarity, this study aims to consider the diversification–performance relationship across developed, emerging and developing countries. Design/methodology/approach The meta-analysis relies on a sample of 293 effect sizes of the diversification–performance relationship from 76 primary studies across 15 countries between 1988 and 2019. The sample excludes effects sizes from papers that consider both product and international diversification to control for complex interactions between the strategies, as well as papers that did not consider both related and unrelated diversification. Findings The results confirm that stronger home-country formal institutions weaken the diversification–performance relationship by decreasing the relative efficiency of internal markets versus external ones. Further, the effect is less negative for related diversification because this strategy can better exploit market frictions in countries with stronger formal institutions and more efficient external markets than its unrelated counterpart. Originality/value The study contributes to the literatures on the diversification–performance relationship and home-country governance by providing robust evidence for how formal institutional quality impacts the efficacy of related and unrelated diversification.

We add a new dimension to the diversification literature by investigating the diversification behaviors of complementors within a platform ecosystem. Drawing on resource based-theory and transaction cost economics, our theoretical framework suggests that the existing diversification measures inappropriately gather diversification breadth and depth under a single construct and treat related and unrelated diversification as if they are exogenous. Collecting and analyzing a unique Airbnb hospitality dataset, 2,969,737 listings by a total of 218,532 Airbnb hosts over 55 months, we provide performance implications of diversification breadth and depth by accounting for the “multi-faceted” nature of these constructs. Our findings on the relationship between diversification breadth and performance suggest that combined related and unrelated diversifiers are the highest performers based on financial metrics but lowest based on “evaluated performance.” We also find that pure related and pure unrelated diversifiers outperform single businesses based on financial metrics but underperform based on evaluated performance. Finally, we found an inverted-U shape relationship between diversification depth (related/unrelated expansion) and performance.

Purpose Despite agency theory and resource dependence theory suggesting that – albeit through different mechanisms – board independence positively influences firm internationalization, empirical evidence on this relationship has been mixed and inconclusive. Based on this, the purpose of the present study is twofold: first, to analyze and synthesize the existing empirical literature and, second, to develop new theoretical insights on the effect of board independence on firm internationalization. Design/methodology/approach The authors used advanced meta-analytic techniques that allowed them, first, to synthesize the existing empirical literature on the board independence–firm internationalization relationship and, second, to examine the effect of several contingencies on such relationship. This study relies on data from 87 primary studies (published and unpublished) carried out in multiple academic fields in the period 1998–2021 and covering 49 countries. Findings The results confirm the established agency and resource-dependence arguments, suggesting that higher board independence is associated with greater firm internationalization. Moreover, the results show that the focal relationship is moderated by home-country formal and informal institutional factors, and in particular, the legal protection of minority shareholders and family business legitimacy. The authors do not find evidence that CEO duality and board size moderate the focal relationship or that board independence has a stronger effect on breadth than on depth of internationalization. Originality/value This study lies at the intersection of the literatures on corporate governance and firm internationalization and on comparative corporate governance of the multinational firm, shedding further light on the role played by institutional environments in determining the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms.

We create a taxonomy of platform-based governance forms and show how they alter our understanding of traditional hierarchies and markets. Specifically, we place these new hybrid forms into the governance space and discuss how the emergence of some of these forms brings market features inside the firm. Our theoretical examination also points out a “reverse evolution” among platform-based governance forms, where platform participants remove the platform-providing firm from the ecosystem and split ownership and control rights among themselves. Finally, we provide an examination of factors yielding the emergence of platform-based governance forms.

This paper presents the most comprehensive review and meta-analysis of the literature on cultural distance and firm internationalization to date. We analyze the effects of cultural distance on key strategic decisions throughout the entire process of internationalization. For the preinvestment stage, we examine the decisions on where to invest (location choice), how much to invest (degree of ownership), and how to organize the foreign expansion (entry and establishment mode). For the postinvestment stage, we examine the decisions of how to integrate the foreign subsidiary into the organization (transfer of practices) as well as the performance effects of cultural distance at both the subsidiary and the firm level. We find that firms are less likely to expand to culturally distant locations but if they do, they prefer greenfield investments and integrate subsidiaries more through transfer of management practices. Cultural distance does not seem to affect how much capital firms invest and whether they enter through a joint venture or full ownership. Interestingly, cultural distance has a strong negative effect on subsidiary performance but no effect on the performance of the whole multinational company. In addition, we find that the effects of cultural distance are not sensitive to time, but they are sensitive to the cultural framework used (e.g., Hofstede vs. Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) and the home country of the company (developed vs. emerging market). Based on our study, we feel confident to offer some theoretical insights, recommendations for improving the validity and reliability of cultural-distance research, and ideas for future research.

The paper focuses on the relationship between corporate governance and international diversification (CG-ID). The study utilizes a multidimensional conceptualization of the two constructs, exploring breadth and depth of ID and several mechanisms of CG (e.g., ownership concentration, CEO compensation, and board independence). Drawing on agency theory, information-processing theory, and institutional theory, we propose bidirectional causal effects between CG and ID. We test the model using meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) with data from 104 primary studies across 28 countries covering the 1970-2012 period and find overall support for our theoretical predictions.

To date international management studies have found mixed results on the relationship between multinationality and performance. We address the multinationality–performance relationship by exploring the concept of conformity in multinationality, which expresses the extent to which a firm’s multinationality resembles the multinationality of its peers at a particular point in time. Our results show that, ceteris paribus, the best performing firms are those with high levels of conformity in multinationality to the strategic group peers as well as those with high levels of conformity to the market leader. Hypotheses are tested with data on the conformity in multinationality of 61 Italian ceramic tile manufacturers in the 2005–2009 time period.

We propose that the mixed findings of research on the internationalization-performance (I-P) relationship reflect its failure to adequately consider the moderating role of firms’ home country formal and informal institutions. This general hypothesis is supported in a meta-analysis of the firm-, industry-, home country–, and host country–level factors driving the I-P relationship across 32 countries between 1972 and 2012 from 359 primary studies—the largest sample of primary studies of any meta-analysis on this topic to date. We make three main contributions to the I-P and global strategy literatures. First, we develop a novel integration of the theoretical logics from the I-P research and the institution-based view of strategy to explain how embeddedness in home country institutions affects the strength of the I-P relationship. Second, we show the importance of including both formal and informal institutions in analyses of firms’ institutional embeddedness, thereby extending our knowledge of the effects of institutional complexity. Our third contribution is methodological and reflects our use of advanced meta-analytical techniques based on both product-moment and partial correlations as effect sizes, which allow us to address unresolved debates about the sign and shape of the I-P relationship. Our results show that the I-P relationship is positive, although the overall effect is small and varies greatly across firms’ home countries. We conclude by discussing the findings’ relevance and promising future research avenues, including novel research questions, multilevel theoretical and empirical frameworks, and improvements in methodological rigor.

Le crisi economiche rappresentano un evento che incide negativamente sulla redditivita delle imprese. Nonostante gli studi di management abbiano offerto una serie di argomentazioni teoriche ed evidenze empiriche su come le crisi economiche influenzano performance e condotte operative delle imprese, una serie di aspetti importanti restano da analizzare nella letteratura esistente. Tra questi, la relazione fra crisi economica, dimensione d’impresa, processi di internazionalizzazione e performance finanziarie. Attraverso un’analisi delle condotte operative e delle performance finanziarie di 59 produttori di piastrelle di ceramica localizzati nel distretto di Modena e Reggio Emilia, nel periodo 2005-2009, il presente articolo mette in evidenza che: 1) in presenza di una congiuntura sfavorevole, l’impatto sulle performance e minore per le medie imprese rispetto alle grandi e alle piccole, 2) crisi economiche internazionali moderano negativamente la relazione tra grado di internazionalizzazione delle vendite e performance, 3) durante crisi economiche internazionali, l’internazionalizzazione della produzione modera positivamente la relazione tra internazionalizzazione delle vendite e performance.

To date international management studies have found mixed results on the relationship between multinationality and performance. We address the multinationality–performance relationship through the concepts of conformity and differentiation in multinationality. Specifically, we introduce the construct of strategic deviation in multinationality, expressing the extent to which a firm’s multinationality differs from the multinationality of its peers at a particular point in time. Drawing on several disciplines (i.e. international management, organizational theory, and strategic management) and specific theoretical domains (e.g. competitive dynamics), we develop hypotheses on the influence of strategic deviation in multinationality on firms’ profitability. Our results show that the best performing firms are those with either low or high levels of strategic deviation in multinationality relative to their peers. By contrast, the firms that achieve lower profitability are those with moderate levels of strategic deviation in multinationality. Hypotheses are tested with data on the strategic deviation in multinationality of 61 Italian ceramic tile manufacturers over the 2005–2009 time period.