Top management team international diversity and the performance of international R&D

Rene Belderbos, Boris Lokshin, Christophe Boone and Jojo Jacob

No 663275, Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven

Abstract: We investigate how international diversity in Top Management Teams (TMTs) contributes to the effectiveness of geographically dispersed R&D strategies in enhancing innovation performance. Both international work experience and nationality diversity may enhance the effectiveness of geographically dispersed R&D when there is alignment between the countries of work experience and nationality of TMT members, on the one hand, and firms’ R&D locations on the other. This influence is stronger for international work experience diversity than for nationality diversity, as the former provides more task-related knowledge to coordinate R&D activities and is less associated with the risk of social categorization. We find partial support for these notions in a panel analysis of the innovation performance of 165 leading MNCs based in Europe, Japan and the United States.

Keywords: diversity; innovation; internationalization; MNCs; R&D; Top Management Teams (TMTs) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42
Date: 2020-11-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-hrm, nep-ino, nep-knm, nep-ppm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
Note: paper number MSI_2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in FEB Research Report MSI_2013, pages 1-42

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/594102 Accepted version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ete:msiper:663275

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().