Internationalization of Firms: Antecedents, Speed, and Performance Implications

The thesis by publication contains three papers and addresses shortcomings in existing literature on internationalization processes of multinational enterprises and international new ventures (INVs). Special focus is given to their subsequent international development (i.e. period after the first international market entry), the role of country differences, and internationalization speed. While previous International Entrepreneurship literature has focused largely on the pre-internationalization period of INVs, this thesis analyzes the subsequent internationalization stage, providing a comprehensive conceptual framework depicting antecedents of INVs’ subsequent internationalization process and analyzes the moderating impact of institutional distance. In addition, different speed dimensions are assessed for their individual impact on international performance for INVs and traditional exporters. Lastly, this thesis introduces and examines the concept of managers’ misperceptions of country differences, which is defined as the deviation between actual differences between countries and managers’ perceptions of these differences. The thesis empirically identifies antecedents of managers’ misperception of country differences and its impact on firms’ host country performance. The thesis uses a multi-method approach consisting of conceptual and empirical work. Data for empirical analysis was collected from the German renewable-energy industry and consisted of a qualitative pre-study and a quantitative study based on data from 251 returned questionnaires. Derived hypotheses of the empirical papers were tested either by employing structural equation modeling or OLS regression analyses. The most important findings highlight that institutional forces play a significant and often overlooked moderating role for internationalizing INVs. Results indicate that these forces considerably impact the internationalization process in terms of internationalization speed, scope, and market entry mode. Furthermore, analyses on multiple dimensions of internationalization speed and their impact on international performance show that the impact varies depending on the dimension considered and can either be positive, negative or non-significant. Results also show that INVs benefit from expanding rapidly into a high number of markets, swiftly increasing international sales, and using equity entry modes. However, traditional exporters only benefit from rapidly increasing international sales. Furthermore, this thesis demonstrates the relevance of the concept of managers’ misperception of country differences, showing that managerial misperception leads to lower host country performance. Additionally, antecedents of managerial misperception are identified and results show that antecedents such as firm size and effective key partnerships in the host country are negatively associated with managerial misperception. Contrarily, a firm’s international scope and cultural distance between the home and host country are positively associated with managerial misperception. The thesis thereby contributes to current research in the field of International Business, provides many avenues for future research, and contains important implications for practitioners.