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Extant literature suggests that post-entry internationalization strategies and performance implications of born globals are an under-researched area. This paper aims to examine the internationalization strategies of born global service firms (BGSFs) and performance implications thereof through strategic group analysis of hand-collected data from Indian information technology (IT) firms.

Strategic group analysis has been used to examine if there are any differences in the strategic decisions across firms and if there are any implications of these strategies on the performance of firms. The strategic group approach helps understand not only the antecedents but also the strategic trade-offs that different groups of BGSFs face after internationalization. The study uses Indian IT industry as the context for analysis of BGSFs, as studies have found that the Indian IT industry to have significant presence of born globals.

Four distinct strategic paths were found to be followed by BGSFs. In addition, the nature of services and ways of mobilization or deployment of resources explain the different internationalization paths and consequently performance. The performance differences primarily stem from the choice of degree of commitment and scope of internationalization.

This study provides distinct insights to practice by charting internationalization paths for an emerging born global.

This paper contributes to the theory on born globals by using strategic lens to explain the internationalization paths and their performance implications.

This paper attempts to examine the activity and involvement of board of directors in internationalization activities of firms in emerging markets, by evaluating the resource provisioning roles of interlocks provided by board of directors, and the frequency of board meetings. We demonstrate that the effectiveness of board involvement is contingent upon the levels of family ownership in firms since family ownership could impact the firm’s ability to utilize the presence of different types of board members.

The authors test our hypotheses on a sample of listed Indian companies, extracted from the Prowess database published by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a database of the financial performance of Indian companies. On a panel of 3,133 firm years of 605 unique Indian firms with foreign investments, over a time period of 2006–2017, the authors apply different estimation techniques.

The results demonstrate that both board meeting frequency and director interlocks are instrumental in supporting internationalization activities in emerging market firms. However, family ownership moderates the role of insider and independent interlocks on internationalization investments in different ways; the authors find that interlocks provided by independent directors support internationalization activities in family firms, whereas those provided by insider directors do not. Further, the study also finds that board meetings are less effective in internationalization of family firms.

The authors conclude that family firms aiming at international diversification require to develop more connected and networked independent directors to enable internationalization in firms. While independent director interlocks enhance the international investments, it is also useful to know that board meetings are ineffective in utilizing the resources in family firms. This points to the possibility that family firms should device mechanisms to integrate family meetings with board meetings so that they can utilize the within-family processes to aid in their internationalization decisions.

The study contributes to resource dependence theory by understanding its limiting role in family firms. Theoretically, it helps delineate the limiting resource provision role of the insider directors vis-à-vis independent directors. The authors argue that the resource provision role of insider director interlocks does not effectively help in internationalization in comparison to independent director interlocks in family-dominated firms. Consequently, the study shows the limiting role of resource provision and utilization by family-owned firms in comparison to non-family-owned firms.