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This study aims to examine the role of returnee managers that can affect the strategic-divestment decision of emerging-market firms (EM firms). Drawing on arguments from the upper echelons theory and international human resource mobility perspectives, this study aims to propose that returnee managers influence corporate divestitures when the business outlook is negative. In addition, this study aims to examine the interplay between returnee managers and CEOs, whose characteristics can foster or undermine the efforts of returnee managers to engage in corporate divestments.

This study examines 278 firms from nine emerging economies. The negative binomial regression was employed to estimate the model. In the robustness checks, the logistic regression was adopted to confirm the earlier findings.

The empirical results support the notion that returnee managers strengthen the relationship between firm performance and divestments. Because of the limited liabilities of foreignness and outsidership, returnee managers can gain social trust and credibility through communication and social interaction. Furthermore, the results provide mixed support for the moderating effect of CEO characteristics on the performance–divestment relationship.

This study reveals that returnee managers are a great asset for EM firms that aim to find synergies and upgrade their capabilities through asset reconfiguration, which is an essential activity of emerging market firms to integrate themselves into the global competition. Meanwhile, CEO characteristics can foster (through their education level) or hinder (due to their age) divestment attempts, influenced by returnee managers.

This study explores an understudied phenomenon in international business (IB): strategic divestment of EM firms. The literature that examines strategic divestment and corporate refocusing in emerging markets is extremely limited. Furthermore, this study explores the novel topic that intersects the international business (IB) and international human resource management (IHRM) research areas. Specifically, this study investigates the impact of returnee managers on strategic divestments.

This study aims to examine the effects of human capital, such as top managers and employees, on the relationship between export and firm innovation. Although the issue of how firms remain creative and competitive in international markets is important both in practice and in research, little attention has been devoted to the internal mechanism through which export affects innovation.

Using a hand-collected data set of human capital on the overseas experiences of managers and educational levels of employees as the basis, this study utilizes Chinese A-share listed firms from 2006 to 2015 to test the research questions through regression analyses.

First, export significantly enhances firm innovation. Second, different types of human capital exhibit different moderating and mediating effects. Specifically, returnee managers play positive moderating and mediating roles on the relationship between export and innovation, whereas highly educated employees exhibit negative moderating effects and no mediating effect. Third, to address potential endogeneity, the authors construct novel instrumental variables of export and human capital and use the two-stage least-squares method to identify causality.

This study provides direct policy implications by showing the roles of export and human capital in innovation, thereby guiding the management practices of firms and talent policies of governments.

The purpose of this study is to examine if the international experience of a family firm’s chairman, second-generation managers and other top managers all have impacts of different strengths using information about Chinese family firms’ international expansion.

Matching tactics and dynamic Heckman 2-stage analysis were applied to data on 766 publicly-listed Chinese family businesses covering 2008–2014.

The international experience of the chairman, second-generation family managers and other senior managers all were found to correlate with the proportion of a firm’s revenue earned abroad, as well as with the number of its cross-border mergers and acquisitions. The impact of a chairman’s international experience is stronger than the impact of the other two groups when internationalization is measured in terms of the proportion of revenue earned overseas. The second-generation managers’ international experience is the most influential when internationalization is measured in terms of the number of cross-border mergers and acquisitions.

This paper bridges agency theory with upper echelons theory in the context of the family business. The findings contribute to the scholarly understanding of family business by illuminating the mechanisms through which second-generation managers may influence family firms’ internationalization. They also enrich the knowledge of family firms in China.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effect of returnee managers on Chinese firms’ performances at overseas markets.

By hand collecting two data set containing managers’ foreign experiences and firms’ principal customers, this study empirically examines the relationship between returnee managers and overseas customers.

The author shows that firms with returnee managers: have higher probability of gaining overseas customers and proportion of overseas sales; and are more likely to conduct international M&A, adopt international Big 4 auditors and list overseas. In addition, returnee executives who came back from individualistic culture with overseas working experience, when entering the overseas market where they have experienced, are more effectively in helping firms to perform well.

The findings in this study suggest that firms with returnee managers are better able to develop relationships with overseas customers and expand overseas markets than those firms without returnee managers.

For policy makers, this study justifies government policies that aim to attract and encourage more returnees to come back. Furthermore, the author shows that returnees with different foreign experiences, national culture of different countries, whether doing business with their familiar foreign country, and their positions in current organizations have different effects on overseas customers. Firms can utilize all these information to choose the “right” returnees to increase their success in overseas markets.

This study is among the first to examine the role of returnee managers in an emerging economy on firm’s probability of gaining overseas customers and expanding overseas sales.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of ordinary returnee and foreign employees in firm export performance, whose impacts have been overseen in prior research. This study also explores whether returnee and foreign employees function as substitutes or complements, and simultaneously considers the impacts of contextual factors on the relationship between returnee (foreign) employees and firm export performance.

Using panel data of Beijing’s Zhongguancun Science Park manufacturing firms over a seven-year period, from 2009 to 2015, the paper applies panel Tobit regression to deal with the left-censoring dependent variable.

This paper finds the number of returnee and foreign employees has significantly positive influence in promoting firm export performance; however, substitution effects exist between them. In addition, the positive effects of returnee and foreign employees on firm export performance are conditional. For foreign employees, the presence of corporate president with international background and firm imports will weaken their positive impacts. In terms of returnee employees, their positive influence proves not to be significantly reduced by corporate president’s international background but weakened by firm imports.

Previous research only highlights returnee entrepreneurs’ and top managers’ positive influence on firm export performance. However, with the development of emerging countries, for instance, China in this paper, ordinary returnee and foreign employees are playing more and more critical roles in firms’ internationalization process. This paper responds to the practical needs to focus on ordinary returnee and foreign employees.

This study examines the effect of cross-border network ties of returnee entrepreneurs on the foreign market diversity of their ventures. The study further investigates how two cross-cultural competencies (global mindset and cultural intelligence) moderate this effect.

A sample of 135 returnee entrepreneurial ventures from China was used to test the hypotheses.

This study finds that returnee entrepreneurs tend to enter into a wide range of culturally different country groups when returnee entrepreneurs have strong cross-border network ties. Moreover, global mindset and cultural intelligence function as complements in strengthening the effect of the cross-border network ties on foreign market diversity.

The authors contribute to both returnee entrepreneurship and foreign market entry literature in two ways. First, by examining the effect of cross-border network ties on foreign market entry, the authors add new and important insights into the role of social networks in the pre-internationalization phase. This is useful in understanding the internationalization process of new ventures founded by returnees, which have not been fully understood in returnee entrepreneurship literature. Second, by examining the moderating roles of global mindset and cultural intelligence, the authors enhance the understanding of the extent to which cross-border networks can be valuable in foreign market entry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors influencing work readjustment of Vietnamese returnees who used to study and/or work in a developed country and are currently working in different positions in their home country.

Data for this study were collected through a survey of 433 returnees using both paper-based and online surveys. Multiple regression was used to test the relationships in the model.

The findings show that while the length of time spent overseas, work expectations and subjective norm significantly affect work readjustment, the influences of age, gender and length of time since return on work readjustment are not supported.

The findings provide useful insights for home country government and managers of returnees developing repatriation programs that help returnees deal with the issue of poor work readjustment.

Empirical studies on cross-cultural re-entry adjustment of both self-initiated repatriates and international students are scarcely investigated. Most prior studies focused on individual factors (such as gender, age, duration in overseas and since return), research on the effect of work expectation on work readjustment is still scant. Most prior studies focused on examining the relationship between work expectation and work readjustment of company repatriates, however, this relationship in the context of returnees, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, has not been investigated. Furthermore, this study is the first to examine the influence of subjective norm on work readjustment of returnees.

Although the role of returnees is critical to firm innovation, the literature offers inconsistent findings regarding returnees' effect on firms' innovation performance. To reconcile this issue, the authors argue that taking the types of innovation into account – i.e. technical innovation and commercial innovation – is necessary. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine how firms led by returnees affect the relationship between research and development (R&D) input and above two types of innovation output, as well as the contingent role of political connections (PCs) and venture capital funding (VC funding).

This study empirically tested the hypotheses using a dataset of 54,617 firm-year observations for 18,475 Chinese firms in Zhongguancun Science Park (ZSP) from 2009 to 2014.

The results show that the positive effect of R&D input on technical innovation performance (TIP) is reinforced when firms are led by returnees, while the positive effect of R&D input on commercial innovation performance (CIP) is weakened when firms are led by returnees compared with those firms led by the local counterparts. The findings further show that returnee firms' positive effect on the relationship between R&D input and technical innovation performance is more salient for firms with more PCs but weakened for those with more VC funding.

This study enriches the research on returnee firms' advantages and disadvantages in transforming R&D input into innovation performance, and the findings highlight that firms led by returnees can increase R&D efficiency of technical innovation, but reduce R&D efficiency of commercial innovation. Moreover, this study offers a contingent view of political and economic stakeholders' roles in returnee firms' innovation, by revealing PCs help returnee firms to enhance R&D efficiency in technological innovation, while venture capital can hamper such R&D efficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the presence of returnees serving on the audit committee affects auditor choice in emerging markets.

Using a logistic model, this study tests the relationship between the presence of returnees in the audit committee and auditor selection and how this relationship varies with the level of agency costs. The authors also perform several other additional analyses to ensure the robustness of the results, including propensity score matching, Heckman’s two-stage model and change analysis.

Using A-share listed companies in China from 2008 to 2016, the authors find a positive association between the presence of audit committee returnees and a demand for high-quality auditors and such association is strengthened in firms with a higher level of agency costs. The authors further find that discretionary accruals and the incidence of financial restatements are lower in firms with audit committee returnees.

Although this study focuses on audit committee members with foreign study or foreign work experience, it remains to be seen if similar effects could be achieved through foreign ownership or work experience with foreign customers or suppliers.

This study provides evidence on a new channel of international knowledge spillover through which the emigration of talent increases board monitoring by demanding high-quality auditors in an emerging economy.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

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