Internationalization And Firm Performance:the Moderating Role Of Top Manager Characteristics

Nowadays, in an era of economic globalization, more and more enterprises adopt the international strategies to expand the markets outside their own countries. In recent years, as one of the burgeoning developing countries, China has really gotten flourishing outcomes in the area of foreign trade and foreign direct investment. Since September 2013, Xi Jinping, General Secretary of CPC, has proposed the concepts of Silk Road Economic Belt" and " the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road", which recently have been hotter and hotter and stimulated the foreign economic cooperation of China.Aiming at pursuing outstanding performance, enterprise, the micro unit of national foreign economic cooperation, will take diverse business strategies in practice. And with the acceleration of economic globalization, many companies choose to take the expansion strategies when operating international businesses. As for enterprises of emerging market countries, they can usually grasp the opportunity of high development in their countries to participate in international competitions. However, the kind of international process sometimes brings not only profits but also costs and risks.Up to now, there are lots of researches studying the relationship between internationalization and firm performance at home and abroad, but because of different situational factors and measurement indicators, the research outcomes seem quite inconsistent. Besides, we find that limited researches have focused on the moderating effect of internationalization and enterprise performance. And in this study, we will try to examine the linkage between internationalization and firm performance in the Chinese context and, at the same time, we hope to research the explore the moderating role of top manager characteristics in this relationship, which will make great theoretical contribution to the literature of strategies.In this study, I reviewed literature in related fields, then deduced all the hypotheses, and examined the whole research model using data of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed manufacturing companies collected from Wind database、CSMAR database and Hexun website. Results showed:1) there was a U-shaped relationship between internationalization and enterprise performance;2) top management team tenure negatively moderated the relationship between internationalization and firm performance. Finally, there were two innovative points in this article:1) this study examined the relationship between internationalization and firm performance in the Chinese context; 2) this article examined the moderating role of top manager characteristics in this relationship.This article was composed of five parts. The first part mainly introduced the research background, the theoretical and empirical contributions, the whole content and the innovations of this article. The second part reviewed related literature for this research. The third part presented whole research plan by deducing all the hypotheses, and this part has chosen the appropriate variables for this study and then constructed the empirical model. Based on data collected from relevant database and website, the fourth part conducted preliminary and correlation analysis for all the variables, and tested the research model using panel data regression analysis. Finally, the last part of this article concluded the outcomes of this study, gave some suggestions for companies to making international strategies, and this part also pointed out some limitations in this study and suggested directions for future studies.