دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی بازخوردهای عملکرد سازمانی و گسترش بین المللی - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

Drawing on performance feedback theory to develop the Uppsala internationalization model, we argue that organizational performance relative to managerial aspirations influences firms' foreign expansion propensity as well as the type of country location. Our statistical analysis of foreign entries by Japanese machinery firms between 1976 and 2002 finds that firms performing closer to aspirations were more likely to enter foreign countries than those that under- or out-performed. Underperforming firms were also more likely to enter countries with greater cultural and geographic proximity to those in which they had already invested. Our findings contribute to international business research by identifying organizational performance conditions under which firms tend to adopt an incremental approach to foreign expansion, or else a comparatively radical one of selecting more distant or unfamiliar countries.

Discussion

Research on performance feedback and research on firm internationalization process share a common emphasis on risk and experiential learning. This commonality offers an opportunity to extend the performance feedback model to the study of when and how firms expand abroad. This study is one of the first attempts to examine the impact of performance feedback on foreign entry decisions using explicit modeling of historically- and socially-constructed performance aspirations. Our statistical analysis of foreign manufacturing entries by Japanese machinery firms supports the thesis that organizational performance relative to managerial aspirations can profoundly shape firms' internationalization process, affecting both the propensity to enter foreign countries as well as the type of country chosen. Empirically, we find that firms are most likely to invest abroad when performance is close to socially- and historically-constructed aspirations, and to abstain when performance is substantially below or above aspirations. The tendency to build on prior investment experience by locating new foreign investments in culturally and geographically familiar countries increases especially when organizational performance is sub-par. Our study makes several contributions to research on firms' foreign investment strategy. First, by drawing on performance feedback theory to relax assumptions in the Uppsala model about managerial risk preferences and learning processes, we are able to generate novel predictions about organizational conditions that moderate the archetype of an incremental approach to international expansion. Our focus on how organizational performance relative to aspirations shifts managerial risk preferences and search behavior complements the traditional view of risk-averse decision-making in the internationalization process. In addition to organizational experience in foreign countries and the characteristics of investment locations, we show that internationalization trajectory is also a function of changes in organizational search efforts and risk-taking attitudes that arise in response to relative performance levels, thus highlighting the adaptive nature of a firm's international strategy (Gavetti et al., 2012).