Research On Internationalization Speed Of Chinese Enterprises From The Perspective Of Behavioral Strategy

With the sluggish global economic recovery and the cautious foreign investment,the international expansion of Chinese enterprises has been surging in the past one decade.However,according to the Report on the Overseas Financial Risk Management of Enterprises(2016),the effective rate of overseas M&A by Chinese enterprises is only one-third,and the final success rate of overseas M&A is less than 20%.As a latecomer to international competition,Chinese enterprises adopt the "leaping" and"accelerating" international expansion mode,so they are often criticized as being"adventurous" or "risky".With the deepening of research on international business,the important concept of internationalization strategy in time dimension-"speed" has been gradually recognized as one of the important factors that determine the performance of corporate internationalization expansion.Meanwhile,the speed of internationalization can be reflected from different aspects,and the international process elements such as overseas location selection(broadness),overseas sales commitment(degree)and overseas entry mode selection(depth)are linked with the time dimension to more clearly and comprehensively reflect the dynamic characteristics of Chinese companies’internationalization.A thorough and detailed description of the internationalization speed and a systematic study on the antecedents enable the enterprises to evade the uncertainty of overseas expansion in a more rational way,gain long-term survival and development through internationalized expansion and strengthen the discourse right on the international stage.These are quite meaningful research topics.Up to now,most of the researches on internationalization strategy are interpreted from Bainian market power protected by monopoly barriers,Penrosian resource advantages protected by factor scarcity,and Schumpeterian innovation driven by entrepreneurship and technology,but the influence of the cognition and behavioral characteristics of the senior managers(as the international strategic decision makers and the leaders)and TMT on the internationalization speed are ignored.It is of great theoretical value to implement the study of internationalization speed at the micro level and explore the origin of internationalization speed from the perspective of behavioral strategy.Based on the above contents,taking different dimensions of the internationalization speed as the contents,behavioral strategy theory as the theoretical foundation,this paper empirically tests the theoretical model of behavioral strategy interpretation for internationalization speed by constructing the balance panel data comprising 2,024 observation values of 253 Chinese listed international enterprises from 2008 to 2015.The research contents and main conclusions are as follows:First,based on the systematic reviewing of previous literature,the speed of internationalization of Chinese enterprises is divided from three dimensions in this research:speed of international sales commitment,speed of international resource commitment and speed of international scope commitment,in order to improve the completeness and authenticity of the description of the internationalization expansion speed of Chinese enterprises.Second,based on the theory of top managers’ power,this paper studies the power’s influence on the internationalization speed of different dimension,and further investigates the mediating effect of the TMT’s attention to internationalization risk on relationship of top managers’ power and internationalization speed.Empirical results suggest that under the double influence of internal motivation to build the "corporate empire" and changes of manager’s risk cognition caused by power,top managers’power has a significant positive effect on the speed of international degree and depth.However,the direct effect of top managers’ power and the speed of international breadth is not significant.However,the TMT’s attention to international risks plays a significant role in mediating the power of top managers and internationalization speed of different dimensions.Third,the moderating effects of group conflict-TMT’s task-oriented faultline and organizational situation-performance aspiration surplus in the relationship between power of top managers and the internationalization speed of different dimensions are examined in this research.The results of multiple regression analysis show that:TMT task-oriented faultline will weaken the positive effect imposed by power of top managers on the speed of international degree.But the regulatory role it plays in the relationship between power of top managers and the speed of international depth and breadth is not significance.the degree of historical performance aspiration surplus will serve as a significant positive role in adjusting the impact of power of top managers on the speed of international depth and breadth,while its moderating effects on the relationship between the power of top managers and degree-based internationalization has not been confirmed.In summary,from the perspective of behavioral strategy,this paper studies the impact of top managers and TMT’s cognition,TMT conflict and situational factors of firms on internationalization speed of different dimension,which responds to the call of the strategy managers for returning to micro-foundation research on corporate strategy,enriches the theory of internationalization process,provides a new theoretical explanation for the rapid internationalization in the Chinese context,and offers theoretical support for the international expansion of enterprises and the construction of TMT to a certain extent.