The home country cultural determinants of firms' foreign market entry timing strategies

Abstract

Firms choose foreign market entry timing strategies based on their perceptions and evaluation of the risks and rewards inherent with early versus late entry into that market. We expect a firm’s home country culture to have a strong impact on these perceptions, resulting in systematic variation in firm entry timing strategy across firms’ country of origin. To this perspective, we integrate extant research which suggests that attributes of the host country environment will impact entry timing as well. Our findings support the argument that home country cultural attributes directly influence whether a firm decides to enter a country earlier or later than other firms, and that the host country’s political environment moderates these effects. Specifically, we find that firms from high performance orientation and high power distance tend to enter countries earlier on average; we also find that countries with weak political freedoms trigger late-entry strategies from high uncertainty avoidance cultures, but earl...