The Effect Of Top Management Team Heterogeneity On Internationalization Degree Of Chinese Enterprises:the Moderating Effect Of Structural Interdependence

With the continuous development of economic globalization, more and more Chinese enterprises have begun to go abroad and implemented the " going out" strategy. The issue that what factors affect the internationalization of enterprises has attracted the attention of more and more scholars. As an important strategy, internationalization is affected by many factors, such as the economic development level, industry competition strength and corporate governance structure. As a team of decision-makers, TMT(top management team) of an enterprise plays an irreplaceable role in the process of internationalization. TMT characteristics and heterogeneity has an important impact on corporate decision-making and the implementation of international strategy.In the current reserach, the results of the researches about the relationship between the heterogeneity of TMT and the degree of internationalization are not consistent, some believe that there is a positive correlation, some think there is a negative correlation, and others show there is no significant relationship. The inconsistent findings may be because of that the heterogeneity of the TMT can only play a larger role when there is more interaction, communication and dependency bewteen the executives. The degree of interaction and communication between executives can be descriped by the concept of "Structural Interdependence". In this article we divide TMT heterogeneity into age heterogeneity, tenure heterogeneity, education heterogeneity and function heterogeneity. First we study the impact of these four aspects of TMT heterogeneity on the internationalization degree of the enterprises, and then we introduce the concept of "Structural Interdependence" as a moderator variable, explore its moderating effect about the relationship between the four aspects of TMT heterogeneity and the nternationalization degree of the enterprises.On the basis of reading literature, we choose China A-share listed companies as our research object. After screening and treatment, we finally get the effective cross-sectional data of312companies. After the statistical analysis of SPSS18.0and Stata11.0, we get the following conclusions:(1) TMT tenure heterogeneity has a significant positive impact on the internationalization degree of enterprises;(2) TMT function heterogeneity has a significant positive impact on the internationalization degree of enterprises;(3) the more the structrual interdependence of TMT, the stronger the positive effect of education heterogeneity on the internationalization degree of enterprises;(4) the more the structrual interdependence of TMT, the stronger the positive effect of function heterogeneity on the internationalization degree of enterprises.