To explore or to exploit? Understanding employees’ internationalization-relevant behavior

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Matthias Baum
• Subject Area: Management and Marketing
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 505870054

Internationalization represents a promising, yet also challenging (Schuster, Bader, Bader, Rousseau, 2021) pathway for firm growth – particularly for smaller firms and new ventures (Sui & Baum, 2014). The field of international entrepreneurship (IE) has provided important contributions about how new ventures enter, operate and succeed in international markets (Jiang, Kotabe, Zhang, Hao, Paul, & Wang, 2020; Jones, Coviello, & Tang, 2011). More recently IE research increasingly emphasizes the international entrepreneurial behaviors (Mainela, Puhakka, & Servais, 2014) of different actors (which can be organizations, groups, or individuals) who explore and exploit opportunities. Even though the field acknowledges that opportunity exploration and exploitation is not only a top-management task, but strongly depends on individual employees (Hubner & Baum, 2018), previous IE studies neglect the role of employees in international opportunity exploration and exploitation. For instance, a recent literature review from Jiang et al. (2020) about IE reveals that none of the 167 reviewed studies explicitly examined the role of employees. Our research project seeks to address this void and contributes to a better understanding on how international new ventures (INVs) can effectively encourage their employees to suit their internationalization and thus to reap its growth potential. Particularly, we observe how such firms can motivate international exploratory and exploiting behaviors of employees (e.g. proactively identifying or realizing opportunities in international markets) and how individual-, leader- and firm level antecedents interact in this regard. In this project, we combine several strands of research, covering multiple levels of analysis (individual-, leadership- and organizational levels) into a comprehensive, context-specific abilities-motivation-opportunity (AMO) framework to predict employees’ international exploratory and exploiting behaviors. Using a mixed methods approach, we conduct four empirical studies (two experiments, one experience-sampling design and a longitudinal qualitative process study) to provide several contributions to IE research and beyond. We are among the first to research when and how employees enact specific exploration and exploitation behaviors. By revealing how employee internationalization-relevant behavior can be stimulated, our project helps to understand how INVs can actually create human-resource based competitive advantages and use the entrepreneurial potential of their employees. Moreover, we contribute to the broader entrepreneurship and management fields, by a) substantiating the role of international entrepreneurial orientations (Covin & Miller, 2014) and leadership (Hubner & Baum, 2018) for enhancing employee international exploration and exploitation b) advancing the debate on the applicability and boundary conditions of the AMO framework and c) extending literature on ambidextrous leadership.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Canada
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Michael Frese
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Nicole Coviello, Ph.D.