مالکیت، جهت گیری استراتژیک و بین المللی در بازارهای نوظهور

For firms from emerging economies, market orientation and entrepreneurial orientation are two of the most important strategic orientations to consider when entering the global marketplace. This study explores how, in emerging markets, ownership structure affects these strategic orientations and their effectiveness in facilitating international business success. Our findings, based on survey data from Chinese firms, suggest that ownership structure, specifically ownership concentration and CEO ownership, can lead firms to choose different strategic orientations. Furthermore, we find that entrepreneurial orientation directly promotes a firm's internationalization activities, whereas market orientation has an inverse U-shaped relationship with internationalization activities.

The past ten years have witnessed rapid growth of internationalization in firms from emerging markets. The World Investment Report (UNCTAD, 2006) suggests that, as a group, firms from emerging markets have emerged as significant outward investors, and scholars have therefore recently engaged in theoretical inquires into the phenomenon of internationalization by such firms. They argue that special institutional characteristics which the transformation of the economic system engenders drive these firms to pursue distinctive approaches to successful internationalization (Child and Rodrigues, 2005, Luo and Tung, 2007 and Yamakawa et al., 2008). From this perspective, institutional factors and specific strategic orientations are the key triggers for achieving international goals in firms which operate in emerging markets. At first, strategic patterns of firms from emerging markets, such as the former Soviet Union and China, followed centralized, state-planned business approaches that are not appropriate for success in a global economy which is characterized by a free market and intense competition (Boisot and Meyer, 2008 and Yamakawa et al., 2008). As reform has been taking place in these economic systems, emerging economies have been experiencing massive and complex changes in institutions, including government, economic systems, and enterprise ownership structures (Child and Tse, 2001 and Peng et al., 2004). Privatization has encouraged more new entrants to come into the market as entrepreneurial startups (Peng, 2003). Firms which are inclined to pursue new opportunities, initiate changes and take risks have led to the prevalence of entrepreneurial activities in emerging markets. The open and free market has thus fostered a competitive business environment. Many firms have realized that they must put more emphasis on customers’ needs and satisfaction in order to remain viable and even to survive (Golden, Johnson, & Smith, 1995). Furthermore, an open door policy leads firms from emerging economies to enter international markets in order to obtain a competitive advantage in the global economy (Boisot & Meyer, 2008). These changes as well as the results they lead to have forced firms to recognize that successful internationalization cannot be achieved using the means and approaches of the old economic system, but instead require firms to learn new business approaches in a global market and adopt appropriate strategic orientations (Li et al., 2006a and Mathews, 2006). Previous studies suggest that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and market orientation (MO) provide the foundations on which a firm can build its interactions with dynamic foreign markets. These orientations determine the firm's behavior and international performance (e.g., Knight and Cavusgil, 2004 and Luo et al., 2005a). Recently, research in strategy and marketing has shown that EO and MO are crucial for superior performance by firms from emerging markets (Lau and Busenitz, 2001, Li et al., 2006a, Liu et al., 2003 and Subramanian and Gopalakrishna, 2001), and that EO is especially helpful for achieving success in foreign markets (Luo and Tung, 2007, Yamakawa et al., 2008 and Zhou, 2007). However, until now research has not identified the different roles that EO and MO play in a firm's internationalization, and has not explored the specific driving effects of EO and MO on a firm's internationalization behavior. More importantly, the constant changes taking place in emerging markets have also caused institutional factors to become important drivers of a firm's choice of strategic postures (Hoskisson, Eden, Lau, & Wright, 2000). One especially important reform is that firms formerly owned only by the government in a centrally planned economy have been allowed to have other owners, including the CEOs (Filatotchev et al., 2001 and Young et al., 2008). Such changes in ownership structure may well influence the strategic posture of firms (Peng, 2003) and may also change the progress of their internationalization. However, precisely how these reforms in ownership structure differently affect strategic orientations such as EO and MO has been ignored in existing literature. To fill these research gaps, this study attempts to address two questions: What are the roles of (i) ownership structure and (ii) particular strategic orientations, in the internationalization of firms from emerging markets? The main contributions of this study are the following. From a theoretical viewpoint, by taking into account the different characteristics of EO and MO, this article explains the differences between the effects of ownership concentration and CEO ownership on both EO and MO, as well as the different effects of EO and MO on the internationalization activities of firms. We provide a theoretical explanation about how ownership concentration and CEO ownership affect the internationalization activities of firms from emerging markets through their choice of EO or MO. From an empirical viewpoint, unlike existing studies which have been conducted in developed economies, we here shift the focus to the context of firms in emerging economies, and investigate the case of firms in China. China, as the largest emerging market in world, has a long history of a centrally planned economy and state ownership of enterprises. Yet today, China is changing from a centrally controlled society into a market-driven economy. Many Chinese MNEs are emerging and posing a major challenge to Western MNEs (Child and Tse, 2001 and Young et al., 2008). During internationalization, these Chinese MNEs have to face not only complex and competitive foreign markets but also turbulent institutional and economic environments. Thus China represents a unique opportunity to test internationalization theory. By using data painstakingly collected through face-to-face interviews with senior executives in charge of 607 Chinese firms, we provide evidence to show that ownership concentration and CEO ownership have different effects on EO and MO. Further, this study examines the positive effect of EO on internationalization activities and the inverse U-shaped relationship between MO and internationalization activities.

The data in Table 2, which includes means, standard deviations, and correlations for all variables, shows that most of the correlations are low to moderate. We next examined the variance inflation factors for all the regression models. The values of VIFs are below 2 in all of the models, suggesting that multicollinearity is not a problem in this study. Table 3 presents the results of the regression analysis. We tested the hypotheses using Optimal Scaling Regression analysis (Didow, Keller, Barksdale, & Franke, 1985). We chose this approach rather than SEM, because the presence of interaction effects does not satisfy the requirements of multivariate normality required by maximum likelihood estimation (Wuyts & Geyskens, 2005). Table 2. Descriptive statistics and correlations. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1. Firm age 1 2. Firm size 0.45** 1 3. Competition intensity 0.03 0.06 1 4. Domestic market strategy 0.00 0.00 0.16** 1 5. Industrial regulation 0.10* 0.03 0.07 0.16** 1 6. Government intervention 0.13** 0.09* 0.07 0.21** 0.52** 1 7. Policy influence 0.07 0.09* 0.04 0.14** 0.31** 0.29** 1 8. CEO ownership 0.06 0.09* −0.04 −0.02 0.03 0.00 0.02 1 9. Ownership concentration −0.21** −0.25** −0.08 0.11** 0.04 −0.04 0.00 −0.15** 1 10. EO −0.07 −0.07 0.06 0.30** 0.14** 0.21** 0.29** −0.03 0.12** 1 11. MO −0.02 −0.03 0.04 0.40** 0.13** 0.21** 0.21** −0.03 0.11** 0.39** 1 12. Internationalization 0.06 0.10* 0.05 0.38** 0.17** 0.28** 0.18** −0.05 0.01 0.33** 0.30** 1 Means 3.34 21.65 4.67 3.87 3.80 4.25 4.71 4.36 2.17 4.86 4.66 3.15 S.D. 1.46 15.78 3.87 0.88 1.31 1.50 1.39 2.25 4.86 0.89 1.05 1.39 * p < 0.05. ** p < 0.01. Table options Table 3. Results of regression analysis. Independent variables EO MO Internationalization Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Control variables Firm size −0.09** −0.06 −0.02 0.06 0.13*** 0.15*** Firm age −0.08** −0.08** −0.09** −0.09** −0.06 −0.05 Domestic market strategy 0.23*** 0.22*** 0.37*** 0.37*** −0.31*** −0.25*** Competition intensity 0.13*** 0.12*** 0.11*** 0.10*** 0.06 0.06 Industrial regulations −0.11*** −0.12*** −0.11*** −0.15*** 0.08* 0.06 Government interference −0.12*** −0.12*** −0.15*** −0.10*** 0.21*** 0.16*** Policy influence 0.20*** 0.19*** 0.15*** 0.11*** 0.07** Ownership concentration −0.07* −0.14*** Ownership concentration2 −0.07* CEO ownership 0.12*** 0.23*** CEO ownership2 −0.17** EO 0.18*** MO 0.13*** MO2 −0.08** Model R2 0.14 0.16 0.18 0.25 0.18 0.23 Adjusted R2 0.10 0.12 0.16 0.21 0.15 0.19 Model F 4.18*** 4.06*** 8.69*** 6.43*** 5.33*** 5.41*** ΔR2 0.02 0.07 0.05 F for ΔR2 7.11*** 13.88*** 12.90*** View the MathML sourceF=(ΔR2/ΔK)(N−K2−1)(1−R22), where K is the number of predictors and N is the total sample size. * p < 0.1. ** p < 0.05. *** p < 0.01. Table options For entrepreneurial orientation as a dependent variable, Model 1 is the base model, including only the control variables. When ownership concentration and CEO ownership are introduced as independent variables in Model 2, the results suggest that ownership concentration is negatively related to entrepreneurial orientation and that CEO ownership is positively related to entrepreneurial orientation. The R2 increase from 0.14 to 0.16, and the change in the R2 between Model 1 and Model 2, were also statistically significant, providing support for H1 and H3. For market orientation as a dependent variable, Model 3 includes only control variables. Because Model 4 shows that the squared terms of both ownership concentration and CEO ownership are negatively and significantly related to MO, we know that the relationships between MO and both ownership concentration and CEO ownership are an inverse U-shape. The R2 increase from 0.18 to 0.25, and the change in the R2 between Model 3 and Model 4, were also statistically significant. Thus ownership concentration, CEO ownership and their squared terms are significant predictors of market orientation, providing support for H2 and H4. Finally, we tested the effect of entrepreneurial orientation and market orientation on the internationalization of a firm, after introducing control variables in Model 5. Consistent with H5 and H6, the results of Model 6 show that entrepreneurial orientation is positively related to internationalization, and that the squared term of market orientation is negatively related to internationalization. The R2 increase from 0.18 to 0.22, and the change in the R2 between Model 5 and Model 6, were also statistically significant, providing support for H5 and H6.