Upper Echelons and Their Impact on Internationalisation Processes

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0, University Witten/Herdecke, language: English, abstract: This essay argues that top management team internationalisation is an important factor of a firm's internationalisation success. Combining Upper Echelons Theory and the Uppsala Stage Model to a causal model as well as giving a link to Born Global Theory, the international backgrounds or experiences of top executives can be expected to have a considerable influence on the top management team's decision making process concerning i) the internationalisation strategy (and thereby the companies' degree of internationalisation) and ii) subsequently the firm performance level. The international backgrounds and the international experiences help the top management team members on the one hand to better understand and on the other hand to successfully deal with the challenges of firm internationalisation processes. Due to the fact that this ability of the top executives is an almost unobservable characteristic and therefore difficult to measure directly, this concept will be illustrated with the help of an inductive case (Eastman Kodak Corp.).