Do international new ventures have attraction advantages? A recruitment perspective on international entrepreneurship
Final Report Abstract
International new ventures (INVs), business organizations that, from inception, seek to derive significant competitive advantage from the use of resources and the sale of outputs in multiple countries are an intriguing phenomenon that has puzzled international business and entrepreneurship researchers for decades. Although prior research recognizes INVs to leverage human capital for competitive advantage, clear emphasis is placed on the role of the founder or top management team in new venture internationalization. Consequently, international entrepreneurship research has yet to consider another source of human capital: INV’s (potential) employees. Given early internationalization is often linked to organizational growth, this gap creates an opportunity for research because we lack theoretical and empirical understanding of how INVs might attract employees as a form of human capital, and who is attracted to work in an INV. In this project, we aimed at examining how the proactive internationalization of a new venture influences its organizational attractiveness and how this relationship is moderated by job seeker characteristics (i.e., personal initiative, networking ability, and international experience). After exploring recruitment practices among (international) new ventures with semi-structured interviews (n=23) with C-level staff, we conducted a metric conjoint experiment (n=3,552 decisions nested within 222 job seekers) to test our theory-driven hypotheses with help of multi-level regression analyses. Our results make several contributions to the international entrepreneurship and international business literature. We broadly confirm that INVs have an attraction advantage – particularly when it comes to recruiting internationally-experienced employees. Accordingly, our study offers a theoretical elaboration and a first empirical test of an organizational attraction mechanism for INVs. We believe this mechanism provides a novel perspective on how INVS might achieve a competitive advantage. That is, they are more attractive to job seekers with the type of experience (i.e., international) that suits the context of an INV. For practitioners, we show that a potential point of differentiation for INVs trying to build their employee base involves explicitly communicating the firm’s proactive internationalization strategy.
Publications
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Recruiting for the international new ventures, AIB WE Workshop in Nuremberg April 5-6, 2019
Volkmer, P.
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Do international new ventures have attraction advantages?. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2021(1), 15844.
Volkmer, Philipp; Baum, Matthias & Coviello, Nicole
