Internationalization of Management Teams and Firms’ Export Growth

Abstract

This paper expands our understanding of the role of knowledge derived from other sources than the firms’ own experience in international markets on firms’ internationalization and does so by focusing on the effect of hiring managers with export experience on firms’ export growth. Econometric analyses on an unbalanced panel of Danish exporters in the manufacturing sector covering the years from 1997 to 2006 are used to investigate this relationship. The results show no significant association between the event of hiring managers with export experience and a firm’s export growth rate. However, it is argued in this paper that the effect of hiring managers with export experience on a firm’s subsequent export growth may depend on the recruiting firm’s prior export experience. The findings support this claim, and show that the effect of hiring managers with export experience indeed depends on the scope of a firm’s export portfolio, measured in terms of number of markets a firm is exporting to. The effect of hiring managers with export experience increases with the number of export destinations. Conversely, the depth of the recruiting firm’s export experience, measured by the number of years a firm has been exporting, does not play a role in this context.