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Drawing on the resource-based view and institutional theory, this study explores how firms select export channels to realise the value of their product development capabilities (PDC) and improve export performance by aligning PDC, entrepreneurial orientation (EO), cultural-cognitive institutional distance (CCID) and channel selection.

This study adopted a quantitative design and used data collected from multiple respondents in 294 Chinese exporting ventures. Hypotheses were tested using logistic regression analysis and multiple regression analysis.

The results of the study suggest that PDC plays a vital role in export channel decisions. The results also show that there is a three-way interaction between PDC, EO and CCID regarding export channel selection. More importantly, this study suggests that firms using export channels that align with PDC, contingent on EO and CCID, generate superior export performance.

This study extends the export channel literature by looking at the different roles of important organisational capabilities (i.e. PDC and EO) on export channel selection. Further, it shows that firms need to align the exploitation of their PDC with the export channel selection, along with EO capabilities, and CCID to achieve better performance in the export market.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize and evaluate recent studies on determinants of export performance.

Using a vote-counting technique this paper reviews 124 papers published between 2006 and 2014 to assess the determinants of export performance.

The results indicate that significant progress has been made during these nine years and that: numerous new determinants are identified, data quality and statistical biases have received considerable attention, and interaction and indirect relationships are considered. However, at the same time, the research of export performance is still limited by a lack of synthetic theoretical basis, inconsistent empirical test results, and insufficiency in the research framework and statistical methodologies.

Export performance has received increasing attention over recent decades, but the area is still characterized by fragmentation and diversity hindering theoretical and practical development. This paper integrates the findings of recent studies on export performance and provides further discussion from both theoretical and methodological aspects, and points out the directions for future research.

This paper aims to examine how sample design affects the relative importance of firm and industry factors in explaining performance variations.

Using a sample of 14,204 Spanish firms over a 10-year time frame, this study uses partial sensitivity analysis to examine the biases in results as a consequence of three methodological relevant concerns: outliers, industry classification and period.

Results indicate that the industry effect, supported by the industrial organization theory, has been underestimated in the empirical tests.

This study examines the biases in results as a consequence of three methodological relevant concerns (outliers, sector classification and period), which have not been sufficiently studied to date. Moreover, the study provides some new evidence favourable to the Industrial Organization (IO) perspective, which could have been biased and underestimated by the literature, as most of the analyses do not consider the methodological issues studied in this paper.

The creativity of retail employees seems to be of the utmost importance for ensuring the performance of organizations in service settings. This paper contributes to the existing theory by investigating the direct and indirect effects of goal orientations on the creativity and performance of retail employees. The authors propose a framework depicting the relationships between goal orientations and employee creativity and performance, including the intervening effects of self-efficacy and customer orientation.

The study was conducted with retail frontline employees of a large retail bank in Portugal. The sample consists of 267 valid responses. Structural equations are used by applying the maximum likelihood method to test the conceptual framework.

Results are broadly supportive of the hypotheses. Learning orientation is, directly and indirectly, related to creativity, but only indirectly to performance. As to performance orientation, it is indirectly related to creativity through self-efficacy and customer orientation, and directly as well as indirectly, to performance. The authors investigate the extent to which the effects of goal orientations on creativity and performance are mediated by self-regulatory mechanisms, namely self-efficacy, and customer orientation.

The results recognize that learning and performance goals are neither mutually exclusive nor contradictory, which collide with past empirical evidence showing that learning goals are generally associated with more favorable outcomes and performance goals with more negative or equivocal ones. These outcomes underscore the need and relevance for managers to foster both goal orientations to promote the creativity and performance of retail employees, representing a particularly salient issue in retail businesses characterized by significant interpersonal interactions.

The paper examines the impact of export activity on productivity and how this effect is moderated by R&D investment and foreign ownership.

A time-lag effect is taken into account when examining the proposed model. Data are collected from the Annual Industrial Survey of the National Bureau of Statistics of China. A dataset containing 117,340 firms across the sample period (2001–2007) are used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that while R&D investment plays a significant role in strengthening the positive effect of export activity on a firm's productivity, foreign ownership surprisingly has a negative moderating role.

Scholarly interest in the links between export activity and productivity is on the rise. However, the bulk of research has been focused on understanding the effects of export activity on productivity at the country or industry level. Little has been done at the firm level. Another gap in the literature is that the mechanism through which the impact of export activity can be leveraged to enhance the firm's productivity has been largely ignored. To address these issues, the study adopts the learning-by-exporting theory to examine the relationship between export and productivity at the firm-level and how R&D investment and foreign ownership may explain how learning can be leveraged to enhance the firm's productivity. Finally, these relationships are examined in the context of firms from an emerging market, China, which is especially relevant for the learning-by-exporting argument used in this study.

Customers play a key role in value creation. Not surprisingly, research has investigated customers’ motivations to engage in the creation of value. Thus, this study aims to assess the link between mood-regulatory processes and customer participation in value creation.

This study develops a model that relates mood-regulatory processes to customer participation and customer value creation, and tests it with a sample of 419 hotel customers, using partial least squares estimation.

It is found that mood clarity relates directly with customer relational value; mood monitoring relates directly with customer participation as well as directly and indirectly with customer economic and relational value; and mood repair relates directly with customer participation and customer economic value, as well as indirectly with customer economic and relational value.

This is a cross-sectional study limited only to hotels in Iran. This is the first study to evaluate the relationship between mood regulation with customer participation and value creation. Hospitality service organizations interested in promoting customer participation may consider mood as a segmentation criterion.

Value creation theory was applied to identify the relationship among customer mood regulation, participation, economic value and relational value, as it is first attempted in the hospitality studies.

To help firms with their international operations, governments often create policies and support mechanisms, but its influence on the firm's exit decision has so far been ignored. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of home-country governmental support on the firm's exit decision.

The authors test their conceptual model using multiple informants as well as secondary data from China. The sample consists of 360 valid questionnaires from 180 firms. Binary logistics regression is used to test the conceptual framework.

By demonstrating that resource-based and institutional constructs are highly dependent, the authors show how home-country governmental support interacts with the foreign affiliate's past performance to explain the decision to remain or exit a foreign market. The results indicate that while governmental financial support reduces the likelihood of exiting a poorly performing business in the foreign market, governmental non-financial support surprisingly has an opposite effect.

While there has been an increasing number of firms exiting foreign markets, this area of research is still limited. The study also contributes to the literature by focusing on home-country governmental financial and non-financial support to explain the firm's exit decision – an issue that has been ignored and is expected to be particularly relevant for firms from emerging economies.

The aim of this paper is to conceptualize the notion of international marketing agility.

The approach adopted is to review and create a synopsis of the existing body of research on strategic agility and develop a conceptualization on how international marketing agility (IMA) should be analyzed.

International marketing agility is an emerging concept driven largely by rapid changes in global markets. There is a growing need for exporting SMEs and multinational enterprises to consider IMA as a means of building competitive advantage in foreign markets.

While the conceptual development presented in this paper is not exhaustive, our model highlights important research avenues in IMA that need exploring.

This article examines an emerging concept in international marketing that serves as a platform to cope with the changes taking place in this fast-changing global environment. A framework is proposed where we conceptualize IMA as a process triggered by agile logic (a nonconformist and open mental stance) and facilitated by agile learning (being able to search and interpret data), to cause agile actions (being able to commit, co-ordinate and respond quickly with flexibility to ever-changing conditions).

This paper aims to investigate how personal values relate to the psychological contract employees establish with their employers.

The sample consisted of 223 frontline employees from a major Portuguese company. The paper used stepwise regressions analysis to test the research hypotheses.

Collectivistic-oriented values were generally related to psychological contract features such as long time frame, lower tangibility, flexibility, inequality and collective regulation. Conversely, individualistic-oriented values were generally associated with a short time frame and a more tangible, stable, equal and individually regulated type of contract with a narrow scope.

This study uses cross-sectional data collected from a single Portuguese company. While common method bias could potentially affect the results, various procedural remedies were used to control for it. Finally, the study relied on stepwise regression, which is a data-driven approach.

The study supports the contentions that internal dispositions are related to psychological contracts.

This paper innovates by exploring how employees’ personal values are associated with the psychological contract from a feature-oriented approach. In addition, this study was carried out in Portugal, highlighting the importance of exploring existing models and theories in different cultural contexts.

Whilst substantial evidence from low-corruption, developed market environments supports the view that more productive firms are more likely to export, there has been little research into analysing the link between productivity and exports in high corruption, developing market environments. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to test the premise of self-selection theory whether the association between productivity and export is maintained in high-corruption environments, and second to identify other variables explaining export activity in high-corruption contexts, including cluster networks and firms’ competences.

The authors draw on the World Bank Enterprise survey to undertake a cross-section analysis including 1,233 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) located in nine African countries. The advantage of this database is that it contains information about the level of perceived corruption at firm level. Logistic regressions are performed for the full sample and for subsamples of firms in high- and low-corruption environments.

The findings demonstrate that the self-selection theory only applies to low-corruption environments, whereas in high-corruption environments, alternative factors such as cluster networks and outward-looking competences (OLC) exert a stronger influence on the exporting activity of African SMEs.

This research contributes to the theory as it provides evidence that contradicts the validity of self-selection theory in high-corruption environments. The findings would benefit from further longitudinal investigation.

African SMEs need to consider cluster networks and OLC as important strategic factors that might enhance their international competitiveness.

The criticism of the self-selection theory is distinctive in the literature and has important implications for future research. The authors show that the contextualisation of existing theories matters and this opens a research avenue for further more sensitive contextualisation of existing theories in developing economies.