Prior experience, entrepreneurial outcomes and decision making in internationalization

Abstract

Internationalization has been the holy grail for many growth-oriented firms, large and small alike, and has attracted immense research interest among scholars. Researchers in the internationalization field have focused on two major important areas: (a) the entrepreneurial performance outcomes of internationalization and its associated antecedents, moderators and mediators and (b) a decision-making perspective and outcomes. Because international performance is a major measure for evaluating the entrepreneurial success of internationalization, a large body of research focuses on the antecedents of internationalization performance. Lately, decision making in internationalization has been emerging as an important area of research in international business (IB) because prior research has not sufficiently addressed this. However, the treatment of prior experience and the inclusion of cognitive theory is missing. Because entrepreneurial managerial cognition is greatly influenced by prior experience (Westhead, Ucbasaran, & Wright, 2005), an understanding of this relationship is crucial. To address this research gap, this dissertation studies cognition-based key antecedents (including prior experience) to entrepreneurial internationalization outcomes (including performance and opportunity recognition) and key internationalization decisions (such as market entry and entry mode choice), using structural equation modeling and scenariobased experiment, respectively.

Overall, this dissertation responds to a call for research on the experience and cognitive perspective in investigating entrepreneurial internationalization outcomes and decision making while making four important contributions to the IB literature. First, it shows how prior experience influences international performance indirectly through the cognitive capital (i.e., global vision) of the owner-managers. Second, it exhibits how prior experience impacts international performance indirectly through export market orientation. Third, it differentiates between exploration and exploitation types of network capabilities and proposes entrepreneurs’ prior experience as an essential microfoundation of such capabilities. Finally, as a response to further research on entrepreneurial managerial cognition, this dissertation makes significant contribution by theorizing and empirically showing that cognitive heuristics and biases interplay in the internationalization decisions of firms.