The field of international business (IB) largely focuses on the inter-country institutional differences, however, very little focus and attention have been given to the social interactions of sub-cultural groups within the country. Could we be overlooking greater opportunities for understanding differences across the diversity within countries? This article aims to provide insights and practical suggestions on: (1) How does leveraging intra-country diversity affect firm performance outcomes globally? (2) Why understanding intra-country diversity is important to the field of IB? and (3) How can IB scholars, managers, and educators engage further as a discipline to explore strategies that achieve more diverse and equitable societal and economic outcomes?

Accompanying the increasing globalization of firms and financial markets has been the growing belief that both firms and their financial markets will benefit from the adoption of improved corporate governance practices, particularly in emerging markets historically dominated by family-owned firms. We provide a more nuanced examination of this belief by advancing a theoretical perspective on the polylithic nature of family-owned firms, and use our typology of family firms to hypothesize why some family firms are more open to improved corporate governance than others. We contextualize our hypotheses using the recent Brazilian financial market reform, which allowed firms to self-select into new trading sub-segments distinguished by the stringency of corporate governance requirements. We offer and test differentiated predictions as to which type of Brazilian family-owned firms is most/least likely to self-select into more stringent trading segments, and with what financial market consequences. We predict and find that Brazilian financial markets do generally reward firms that choose a more stringent stock market segment, but do not anticipate that some firms engage in symbolic vs. substantive adoption of good governance practices. We discuss the implications of our approach and findings for research on corporate governance, family-owned firms, and institutional change in emerging markets.

We know what a world dominated by men — by male CEOs, management teams, and heads of state — looks like. Consider for a moment what the world might look like if female leaders were the norm. Research from McKinsey has found that firms that outpace their peers on the number of women in top management see a financial performance benefit of up to 15% over the industry median. Might a similar benefit be true on the world stage?

This article provides insight on the historically dominant ownership structures in Latin America known as grupos. Unlike the widely-held standalone firm, the corporate governance dilemma in these business groups often arises between the concentrated ownership and outsiders from the lack of minority shareholder rights coupled with self-dealing schemes of the dominant controlling owner. The more recent stock market reforms of the MILA and BOVESPA exchanges, suggest that the long-term strategy for Latin American markets is not to expect these dominant ownership structures to change, but instead to focus attention towards understanding the corporate governance incentives that motivate business groups’ behaviors.

Racial/ethnic diversity within groups, organizations, and countries can have negative externalities if left unmitigated. Inequality and exclusion, downsides of the diversity within societies, have been shown to hinder overall productivity. This study posits and finds that the presence of a female national leader mitigates such effects. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed over 5,800 leader-year observations in 126 countries from 1950 – 2009 and found that having female leaders in highly ethnically diverse countries resulted in positive economic growth. We further analyzed survey results from over 245,000 respondents in 83 countries and found that female leaders in highly diverse countries are associated with greater individual-level participation such as self-expression and empowerment, especially among minority groups and women, and greater tolerance for diversity especially among majority group members. The empowerment and tolerance incentivized by female leaders is associated with increased economic performance in diverse countries. Implications for the changing gender composition of leadership throughout society are discussed.

Citigroup has discovered that Daniel Dantas, hired five years earlier to manage Citigroup's $750 million private equity investment in a Brazilian telecommunications industry joint venture, has allegedly mismanaged more than $300 million in assets and contracts. Dantas's misconduct relates to his management of Citigroup's CVC Fund and II-FIA, a legal entity representing a group of large Brazilian pension funds. Together with Dantas's Grupo Opportunity, CVC and II-FIA own Brasil Telecom, the third largest telecommunications company in the country. The partnership's pyramidal ownership structure makes his actions difficult to track. Citigroup must quickly determine how to disrupt Dantas's intricately woven web of control without allowing him to extract further value from the partnership. This case provides concrete examples of the expropriation risks joint venture partners face when unfamiliar with pyramidal group ownership structures. Understand and recognize governance-based differences between a pyramidal business group (e.g., the joint venture related to Brasil Telecom) and that of a widely held firm (i.e., a typical U.S. firm's ownership structure); understand that to avoid market failure firms must anticipate and adjust to the non-market institutional “rules of the game,” which vary greatly across nations; and understand the range of strategic choices and their optimal application to protect minority shareholder rights.

This study reexamines organizational learning theories to reconcile the conditions under which prior internationalization experience leads to performance gains for multinational corporations (MNCs) with varying host-country institutional experiences in different regulatory environments. Using field studies on telecommunications regulation, executive interviews conducted in Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Canada, and the U.S., and foreign direct investment data for 96 subunit operations investing in the Brazilian telecommunications industry from 1997 to 2004, I develop an experiential-learning theoretical framework to explain the mechanisms driving MNCs' performance in subsequent host-country institutional environments given the prior experience they acquired in 80 heterogeneous regulatory environments. I predict and find that MNCs with highly similar institutional experience compared with the target country's institutional environment will succeed. Empirical evidence suggests that similarity, breadth, and depth of prior regulatory experience significantly prolong survival. In contrast, firms with institutional experience unrelated to the target country's regulatory environment experience learning penalties and are six times more likely to fail. These findings suggest that variations in learning contexts affect organizations' learning curves.

This study applies factor analytic techniques to 131 telecommunications regulatory agencies in 80 countries to develop a comparative framework for better understanding the cross-national institutional variation in industrial regulation. While some of these measures are specific to the telecom industry (i.e., WTO Basic Telecom Agreement participation), most of these regulatory variables can be applied to other regulated industries. After analyzing thirty variables, these techniques identify and quantify six distinct dimensions of industry regulation, namely, the competitive market structure rules, industry standards rules, entry barrier rules, institutional stability, political appointment process and the regulatory governance structure. Despite the conventional wisdom that suggests the rules of the game are key to industry regulation, this study finds that the single largest source of cross-national variation is the level of regulatory institutional stability (accounting for 16% of the total variation in cross-national industry regulation). This suggests that more focus and attention should be given to the role formal institutions play in industry regulation. This study also finds differences in industry regulation between developed, developing, and least-developed nations. Developed countries on average have significantly higher regulation with the U.S being the highest. This suggests that regulation is a critical component of industrial regimes and the competitiveness of developed economies.

We examine international joint ventures in the telecommunications industry in B razil, where pyramidal groups are ubiquitous. We explain how corporate governance differences between pyramidal groups versus widely held freestanding firms can lead to joint venture failures. Our empirical results show that joint ventures between pyramidal group‐member firms and partners from countries where pyramids are rare have significantly elevated failure rates, while joint ventures with partners from countries where pyramidal groups are ubiquitous are more likely to succeed. Further, we provide clinical examples illustrating the mechanisms driving divergent partnership performance.

A recent Forbes.com article states that “Women must take a special interest in supporting other women in order to help make gender equality in business a reality” (Perkett, 2014). But to what extent do women actually serve as catalysts for reducing inequality? As women now hold about fifty-percent of all management positions (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013) and are becoming the majority of new entrants in high-status professions, such as medicine (American Association of Medical Colleges, 2013), management scholars are beginning to examine the impact of women leaders, in particular, on gender inequality (e.g. Hoff 2010; Perkins, Phillips & Pearce, 2013; Powell & Butterfield, 2013). Given the pervasiveness of gender inequality in terms of wages, job segregation, and access to resources, for example, it becomes pertinent to understand whether women leaders provide a potential lever for reducing this form of inequality. Thus, our proposed panel symposium will address the following central questions: What role do women leaders play for gender inequality, and what does this role really mean in the continued transformation of organizations and professional labor markets and practices in the 21st century?

National leaders have the ultimate responsibility to balance the needs of a diverse set of constituents in society while using their country’s unique set of resources to grow the economy and gain comparative advantages. Ethnic diversity is known to be an extremely challenging factor to reconcile nationally and is negatively associated with GDP growth; in fact, high levels of ethnic diversity are associated with a 2 percent decline in GDP growth. 1 In most countries throughout modern history, the role of the national leader has been played by men. Women historically have had limited opportunities to lead their countries and in many early cases, only by the failing of their husband’s health or his death did they ascend to power. In the last decade, however, more women have been elected to lead their countries, such as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in the Republic of Liberia; Angela Merkel of the Federal Republic of Germany; and most recently, Park Geun-hye in the Republic of Korea, under the political platform of harmonious unification with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. With the rise in female national leaders, it begs the question whether there are some conditions in which women might be more effective leaders than their male counterparts. This study examines the intersection of ethnic diversity, gender, and leadership to explore the effectiveness of male versus female leadership in highly diverse societies, as compared to more ethnically homogeneous ones. We examine a unique dataset of 5,709 observations of national leaders in 139 nations over more than five decades. We find that in more ethnically diverse nations, the presence of a female national leader is correlated with a 6.6 percent increase in GDP growth in comparison to having a male leader. We offer some plausible rationales for these patterns and discuss the policy implications of our findings.

The fundamental unit of production in microeconomics is the firm, and this mirrors reality in the United States and United Kingdom.But elsewhere, business groups can be the more important unit, for business strategy is often formulated at the business group level, not the firm level.In many countries, this is legally enshrined in corporate governance codes that assign officers and directors a duty to act for their business group, not their firm or its shareholders.Even where a duty to individual firms' shareholders exists, business groups often have pyramidal structures of intercorporate blockholdings that entrench controlling shareholders, usually wealthy families, who run their groups to maximize their utility.This can impose exacerbated agency problems.In either case, foreign joint venture partners who expect domestic firms to maximize shareholder value can be sorely disappointed.We explain agency behavior in business groups and how controlling insiders can divert resources between firms they control, including joint ventures, to enrich themselves; and highlight differences between this behavior and agency problems in freestanding firms.We then examine the telecoms industry in Brazil, a country in which most large businesses belong to pyramidal business groups controlled by wealthy families.We find that joint ventures between Brazilian telecoms firms and partners from countries where business groups are rarer have significantly elevated failure rates; while joint ventures with foreign partners from countries where pyramidal groups are more common are more likely to succeed.We then present clinical examples illustrating the mechanisms that drive such divergent performance in joint venture partnerships.While our results are based on a single industry in a single country, we believe they highlight a previously unexamined important issue in international business strategy.