Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies

This article analyzes allegiances of three groups of employees in foreign subsidiaries of multinational enterprises—parent country nationals, host country nationals, and third country nationals. Building on, but different from existing work, we broaden the focus of inquiry from expatriates at the managerial level to (a) include other categories of subsidiary employees and (b) incorporate in our analysis host country nationals rather than focus exclusively on expatriates. We explore the notion that the allegiances of subsidiary employees may be conceptualized as being split among three potential objects of allegiance, namely the focal subsidiary, the headquarters, and the subsidiary host country. Our key arguments are summarized in a framework, complemented with a set of theoretical propositions and implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Traditionally, few companies were worried about Chinese, Indian, or Russian companies becoming important global players. Now companies from emerging market economies are starting to do just this and are emerging as significant global competitors. It is clearly time to pay attention to emerging market multinational corporations as serious competitors. This article seeks to help with this task by investigating the internationalization of firms from China, India, and Russia, and developing an understanding of what firms from transforming economies should do to increase their chances of success. The article also shows that they internationalize for different reasons using different entry mode ordering and by initially entering different countries than would their Western counterparts. This article develops a new framework called the Five M framework to guide managers and academics in their understanding of the internationalization of firms from transforming economies. With the help of illustrative examples from 18 mini case studies, this article investigates the motivations, markets, entry modes, methods, and management practices that have allowed these firms to be successful.

Drawing on the resource-based view and the behavioral theory of the firm, we examine how resources and aspirations affect rapid internationalization of firms from emerging economies. Using a 5-year panel from 257 publicly listed manufacturing firms from China, we find that neither technological resources nor marketing resources—two knowledge-based drivers traditionally identified to be behind internationalization—directly drive these firms’ growth in internationalization. Instead, we find that emerging multinationals’ performance relative to aspirations has a U-shaped impact on their growth in internationalization. In addition, technological resources amplify the U-shaped effect of performance relative to aspirations, while marketing resources weaken the effect.

This article assesses the role of human asset quality in the internationalization of small and medium-sized family enterprises. Building on mainstream international business theory, we propose a model with three “states” of human asset quality (low, medium, and high) available to the firm that can be linked to particular levels of export intensity. Importantly, achieving higher export intensity is not always associated with higher human asset quality across the board: There is a key difference between generic (generally available) and specialized (highly firm-specific) human asset quality. We empirically test our model through Tobit panel data analyses with random effects, whereby we study a sample of 610 Spanish firms for the period 2006 to 2010. This research represents the first-ever work conceptualizing and empirically testing a nonlinear, cubic relationship between human asset quality and small and medium-sized family enterprises’ internationalization levels. We find an S-shaped relationship between both general and specialized human assets and the level of export intensity.

Firms struggle to be ambidextrous in the sense of being able to successfully manage both new and incremental innovation activities simultaneously. Applying the knowledge-based view, we examine the important moderating influences of supplier involvement and foreignness on the relationship between innovation ambidexterity and performance. We test our hypotheses at the business-unit level of analysis in the emerging market of Brazil. We examine two types of innovation ambidexterity: the balanced dimension and the combined dimension. We found that firms possessing greater supplier involvement reap higher performance benefits from the combined dimension of innovation ambidexterity. Last, foreign subsidiaries also achieved higher levels of performance than domestic firms from the combined dimension of innovation ambidexterity.

From 2000 to 2015, Vladimir Putin presided over Russia’s retreat from a nascent, market-based economy to a more familiar, yet problematic state-centered system. Grounded in statist ideology, Putin successfully leveraged the Russian people’s culturally embedded proclivity for personal networking in assembling his administrative coalition of former KGB, military, and government ministry connections known as the siloviki. This circle of trusted advisors would become instrumental in achieving Putin’s comprehensive agenda for the wholesale deinstitutionalization of Russia’s formal institutional context. In this article, we provide a dual-level perspective of the longitudinal erosion in Russia’s independent media, electoral process, judicial independence, and civil society, along with the corresponding effects on the attitudes and behaviors of Russia’s corporate leadership. Our insider view of organizational leadership comes from more than 20 years of interacting with Russian executives through research, training, and consulting, as well as the personal accounts provided by our Russian associate who worked closely with a single corporate leader in banking from 2000 to 2015. Russia’s institutional erosion presents significant challenges for conducting business as well as opportunities for research in the midst of a nearly unimaginable institutional reversal in one of the world’s most important transition economies.

Much has appeared in the literature about institutional voids, a component of institutional theory. Little has been written, however, about the effects of institutional voids on individuals in emerging market nations and how they might react in proactive ways, including leaving their home country problems to pursue opportunities elsewhere. This article focuses on how institutional voids can create opportunities not only for such individuals but also for the firms that they join and the national economies of their host countries. We illustrate this juxtaposition from problem to opportunity by providing background on institutional voids in Russia as well as the welcoming institutional environments experienced in the United States. We do so by presenting some early findings from a larger ongoing research project. We emphasize not only the individual successes of migrants we interviewed as they seized opportunities afforded by their substantial backgrounds but also the resulting benefits to the U.S. firms that they joined or founded, as well as to the U.S. innovation economy. As illustrations, we offer the profiles of three professionals who came from Russia around 2000. They are part of a much larger group that came from various countries of the former USSR whom we interviewed in the Silicon Valley and Boston–Cambridge innovation hubs.