Jean-Luc Arregle

Partner Selection in Emerging and Developed Market Contexts: Resource-Based and Organizational Learning Perspectives

This study of the international partner selection of firms from emerging (Mexico, Poland, and Romania) and developed (Canada, France, and the United States) markets supports resource-based and organizational learning explanations of such partner selection, a critical factor for success with international strategic alliances. Emerging market firms emphasized financial assets, technical capabilities, intangible assets, and willingness to share expertise in selection of partners more than developed market firms. In contrast, developed market firms tried to leverage their resources through partner selection. In particular, they emphasized unique competencies and local market knowledge and access in their partner selection more than emerging market firms.

Home Country Institutions and the Internationalization-Performance Relationship A Meta-Analytic Review

We propose that the mixed findings of research on the internationalization-performance (I-P) relationship reflect its failure to adequately consider the moderating role of firms’ home country formal and informal institutions. This general hypothesis is supported in a meta-analysis of the firm-, industry-, home country–, and host country–level factors driving the I-P relationship across 32 countries between 1972 and 2012 from 359 primary studies—the largest sample of primary studies of any meta-analysis on this topic to date. We make three main contributions to the I-P and global strategy literatures. First, we develop a novel integration of the theoretical logics from the I-P research and the institution-based view of strategy to explain how embeddedness in home country institutions affects the strength of the I-P relationship. Second, we show the importance of including both formal and informal institutions in analyses of firms’ institutional embeddedness, thereby extending our knowledge of the effects of institutional complexity. Our third contribution is methodological and reflects our use of advanced meta-analytical techniques based on both product-moment and partial correlations as effect sizes, which allow us to address unresolved debates about the sign and shape of the I-P relationship. Our results show that the I-P relationship is positive, although the overall effect is small and varies greatly across firms’ home countries. We conclude by discussing the findings’ relevance and promising future research avenues, including novel research questions, multilevel theoretical and empirical frameworks, and improvements in methodological rigor.

Event Count Analysis and Strategic Management

The development of strategic management research has brought about an increasing emphasis on longitudinal research. Concurrently, there is a long-standing interest in the ‘actions’ of organizations (mergers, alliances, technical innovations, et cetera) which typically involve relatively discrete events rather than changes in the level of a continuous variable. Thus research on organizational actions results in the analysis of discrete events over time. A number of empirical studies of this type have been published in the strategic management literature, and the number is likely to increase over time Event history analysis is the preferable method for this type of research. Unfortunately, in many instances complete information on the type and timing of organizational actions is not available; many secondary sources provide only the number of events occurring during some period of time. In that case, event count analysis can provide meaningful inferences about factors influencing the rate of occurrence of strategic events. In this chapter we review two stochastic models (Poisson and Negative Binomial) appropriate for event count analysis. We begin with a brief description of the relationship between event histories and event counts. We then discuss specific issues involved in conducting event count analyses. For purposes of illustration, we provide the results of an analysis of mergers among French firms. The chapter ends with a summary discussion of the limitations and advantages of event count modeling.

The career-horizon problem in capital investments for lone-founder and long-tenure acquirer CEOs in their final career stage

In this study, we apply organizational identification theory to enrich our knowledge of the career-horizon problem when CEOs are approaching retirement. The extant literature suggests that the closer a CEO is to retirement, the more likely she or he is to avoid long-term firm investments. Focusing on capital investments, we argue that the distinctive organizational identification with the firm of lone-founder CEOs and long-tenure acquirer CEOs can moderate the likelihood that the closer a CEO is to retirement, the more likely she or he is to avoid capital investments. We test and validate our hypotheses on a sample of CEOs in S&P 1500 non-financial firms between 1999 and 2010. This article contributes to the literature on CEO career horizons by providing a new and more fine-grained perspective on the important question of how different types of CEOs consider capital investments and the future of their firms as they approach retirement.