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The purpose of this paper is to incorporate the resource-based perspective with upper echelon theory to examine the effect of top management teams’ (TMTs) managerial resources on international diversification.

The authors sampled 360 listed companies in the USA that operated in the information technology industry in 2009, the year after the financial crisis.

The findings show that TMTs’ tenure has a negative impact on international diversification but international experience exerts a positive impact on international diversification. Furthermore, TMTs’ educational background diversity and international experience contribute to a reduction in the negative effect of tenure on international diversification.

Prior studies have investigated the role of TMT in international diversification, but they pay less attention to the interactive effect of the variety of managerial resources on international diversification. In particular, the authors examined the effect of a variety of management resources on the level of international diversification under the uncertain environment.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze corporate scope decisions in acquisitions with a focus on the relationship between target country unfamiliarity and acquirer-to-target relatedness and on the moderating effects played by product diversification and international experience.

Using a dataset of 689 acquisitions completed in the period 2007-2013 by acquirers located in 60 countries, this paper utilizes an ordered logistic regression analysis.

With greater target country unfamiliarity, acquirers are encouraged to pursue greater acquirer-to-target relatedness. This finding suggests that acquirers tend to seek a balance between product and international diversification to reduce the sources of uncertainty in their acquisition moves. While past international experience strengthens this relationship, diversification experience has a negative moderating effect and hence encourages acquirers to reduce relatedness at increasing market unfamiliarity.

The originality of this paper is twofold. First, the authors extend the traditional internationalization-diversification framework to an unfamiliarity-relatedness relationship in the context of acquisitions. Second, the authors propose a construct of target country unfamiliarity in acquisitions that goes beyond the traditional domestic vs cross-border dichotomy by including previous experience in the target country.

Diversification is one of the most promising strategies for tourism firms, the entry mode choice being an essential decision. For this reason, this paper seeks to analyze the entry mode into new business areas made by Spanish tourism firms in their diversification process. It aims to focus on firm factors drawn on the resource‐based view (RBV) to examine issues such as the link between the new business and the company's original one, its diversifying experience, the reasons for diversifying and the impact of the choice of internal growth, external growth or cooperation agreements. The effects of a fit between the entry mode and the type of diversification on profitability are also considered.

From a mail survey to Spanish tourism firms 94 entries into new business areas were obtained and a multinomial logit regression applied.

The results show that both the diversifying experience and the reasons behind the decision to diversify influence the entry mode and support the existence of a link between the above‐mentioned fit and firm profitability.

The paper contributes to providing new empirical evidence about entry mode decisions, with the innovation that it has focused on a group of enterprises, those belonging to the Spanish tourism sector, which had traditionally received less attention within this field of research.

The premise of this paper is that coordination between market‐related diversification strategies and supply chain management (SCM) strategies will lead to better performance than when the two strategies are pursued independently. Viewed in this perspective, this research proposes that (supply chain) SC integration plays an intermediate role in influencing the relationship between diversification and performance. In order to confirm the validity of the above proposition, structural equation model was used to analyze the interrelationships among SC integration level, diversification level, SCM performance, and firm performance. The results of this study suggest that in small firms in which the direct effect of diversification on firm performance is absent relatively, the level of SC integration may be a critical intervening variable that could lead to successful diversification, while in case of large firms, SC integration may play an important infrastructural role for direct effects of diversification level on firm performance. This is helpful in developing a framework for linking a firm's SC integration strategy to its market/product diversification strategy, and also in identifying how SCM function can play a role in developing and supporting corporate competitive strategy to improve organizational performance.

Although diversification is now seen as an inevitable course for grocery retailers, Sainsbury's managing director Roy Griffiths suggests that in the 1980s companies may be less interested in diversification than in divestment. Mr Griffiths was speaking at the Institute of Grocery Distribution Convention in Brighton in April, shortly before his company released news of record figures for 1979–80. He regards earnings per share as a crucial factor in assessing company performance; Sainsbury have increased their real earnings by 4.2% per annum compound over the last seven years — and not, he insisted, at the expense of manufacturers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants and motives for supply of trade credit among agro-food manufacturing firms in African countries.

The paper uses a subsample of food manufacturing firms from World Bank Enterprise Survey in eight African countries in 2014. Two-limit Tobit models are specified for the determinants of trade credit supply (TCS) and the motives for TCS are inferred from the determinants. An instrumental variable two-limit Tobit model is estimated to check the endogeneity of trade credit received (TCR) in relation to trade credit supplied.

The level of TCS is significantly related with degree of product diversification, manager experience, level of TCR and overdraft availability. From the results, financing motives (particularly liquidity and redistribution) and commercial motives (particularly marketing and quality guarantee motives) for TCS are implied.

The parameter estimates may contain both demand and supply effects as the two effects cannot be separated due to absence of information on firms’ customers in the data set. The results should be interpreted in this context.

The motives for TCS by agro-food firms is less understood in the agricultural finance literature and this paper makes an important contribution in this regard. In particular, the paper shows the degree of product diversification is directly associated with TCS, a relationship which has not been explored in the trade credit literature.

Given that several publicly announced international merger and acquisition deals have been abandoned in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to present a synthesis of influential articles that examine organizational characteristics of cross-border acquisition transactions. The synthesis is framed through general traits and resources, learning and prior acquisition experience, and top-level management and governance attributes. Specifically, the paper conceptualizes key organizational attributes influencing the propensity of cross-border negotiations, and the most common characteristics and post-deal effects by illustrating several case examples from around the world.

Owing to fairness and integrity principles of the literature survey studies, the paper adopts an exploratory review design to present a synthesis of several influential articles published in strategy, international business and corporate finance journals. Since case method and storytelling are the best qualitative approaches to conceptualizing extant theoretical contributions, a number of case examples—successful, delayed and abandoned—from around the world have been discussed by leveraging the case information from archival sources.

Drawing on resource-based view, organizational learning, upper echelons and agency theory perspectives, the paper underscores three observations. First, organizational characteristics such as firm age, firm size, ownership structure, slack resources, marketing resources, technological intensity, export intensity and business group affiliation have different impacts on the propensity of publicly announced cross-border deals. Second, firm’s prior acquisition experience and firm’s acquisition experience in the target country have positive or moderating effects on the success of a cross-border merger. Third, top-level management characteristics such as CEO foreign nationality and CEO international career experience, and governance characteristics such as board size, the number of independent directors and directors with overseas experience, have mixed effects on the incidence of cross-border acquisitions.

The paper puts forth several recommendations for top-level managers participating in cross-border acquisition negotiations, such as learning from peers in the same industry, learning from predecessors in the target country and learning from failure negotiations in the same industry and other industries.

Nested within the organizational, international business strategy and corporate finance literature, the paper presents a synthesis of influential publications that study organizational characteristics affecting the propensity of cross-border acquisitions. The cases discussed in this paper are unique examples from around the world.

This paper aims to examine whether there is evidence of pioneering advantage in long‐term survival terms in the particular context of franchising.

Data covering 188 franchise chains for an eight‐year period (from 1995 to 2003), operating in restoration and fashion retailing sector are used. The Cox proportional hazard model is used to examine survival. The existence of pioneering advantage is tested in the Spanish context because its franchising sector is one of the most developed in Europe, along with those of France, the UK and Germany.

Empirical evidence of pioneering advantage was found. Early entry strategy leads to lower failure risk. Different strategies are highlighted according to different entry time moments, suggesting a moderating role of the entry timing decision. Additional variables influence survival such as previous experience or dual distribution.

The paper has some limitations. The focus is just on one country. Therefore, a multi‐country study could help to generalize the results. Furthermore, the research could be improved by adding variables of the specific franchise context such as the franchise fee or the royalty rates.

The results may help franchisors to improve their survival, adapting their strategies to be more competitive in the market. Depending on their entry timing decisions, they can have different strategies to continue in the market. Pioneers differ from late entrants in terms of ownership structure and system size – two main aspects for survival. Moreover, the paper can help the prospective franchisee in making a better selection of franchise chain in which to invest. Findings support the idea that entering at the early stages of the franchise industry brings some advantages.

The paper highlights the importance of the entry‐timing decision in the franchising context using survival as performance. This objective has not been underlined in previous research.

This study investigates the influence of entrepreneurial experience on small business investment. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether entrepreneurs with more prior start-up experience are better able to identify business opportunities and successfully transform these opportunities into investment projects.

The empirical setting in this study is Vietnam. The authors employ a panel data of small businesses (mostly households) from 2005 to 2013, and use a fixed effect method to estimate the regression coefficients. The results are also re-checked using the general method of moments and matching technique.

Empirically, it is found that entrepreneurial experience is an important determinant of investment decisions. Specifically, entrepreneurs with one start-up experience make more investments than novice entrepreneurs. However, entrepreneurs with more than one start-up experience do not make more investments than entrepreneurs with one start-up experience.

This is country-specific research. Further study may employ data from multi-countries to re-test the validity of the hypotheses.

This study provides a new perspective for analysing the role of entrepreneurial experience on entrepreneurial investments. It shows that prior start-up experience may turn out to be a liability to entrepreneurs since it restricts their ability to identify new opportunities.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual foundation of a fit between top management teams (TMTs) and their company’s corporate strategy. The authors fortify the importance of the concept of fit if the impact of upper echelons on organizational performance is trying to be explained. Yet, a constitutive concept of fit for the corporate strategy, a particularly important dimension of strategy, was previously neglected.

In a conceptual/theoretical approach, the authors selected demographic managerial characteristics from previous empirical studies from the research stream on upper echelons and combined them with other promising characteristics. To analyze them in respect to the requirements of low and highly diversified companies, the authors applied the concept of the dominant logic, an important theory in the field of corporate strategy.

The authors establish two distinct profiles of TMT members for low and high degrees of diversification and provide guidance on how to measure the TMT-corporate strategy fit – for individual TMT members and for the entire TMT – as a degree of fit on a ratio scale.

This work constitutes the first exhaustive concept of a TMT-corporate strategy fit. It provides a profound research foundation for scholars in the field of TMTs and the upper echelons theory as well as a promising and complementary perspective for practitioners when assessing their TMT composition.