Dynamic managerial capabilities, international opportunities, and international performance : evidence from an emerging economy

Abstract

The opportunity has become a central concept in the international entrepreneurship (IE) literature, and there is now a critical mass of literature focused on entrepreneurial behaviors of pursuing opportunities across national borders. However, scholarly studies claim that research on these opportunity-related behaviors should consider an individual-level analysis to understand better how managers discover, enact, evaluate, and exploit opportunities to capture the market value and achieve international performance. The main objective of this study is to analyze from a dynamic managerial capability perspective the relationship between managerial capabilities, international opportunities, and international performance. The research used a mixed research methodology through qualitative and quantitative analysis (multiple case-study and structural equation modeling respectively) in international ventures from Colombia, a Latin American emerging economy. Overall, the main findings of the study clarify the nature and pattern of opportunity-related behaviors and the way individuals (managers) deploy specific cognition, human capital, and social capital capabilities to discover, enact, evaluate, and exploit international opportunities. Moreover, the results show that the interplay of these managerial capabilities serves as a platform to reconfigure existing capabilities, and thus obtain performance in international markets. The findings also suggest that managers' opportunity-seeking behavior becomes a dynamic managerial capability that enables them to develop more sophisticated capabilities and therefore respond to changing market conditions to get a competitive advantage. The study contributes to knowledge of IE by clarifying the interaction between entrepreneurial individual acting and international opportunities. Furthermore, the academic contributions of this thesis include the extension of Jones and Coviello's (2005) model and previous models by developing a model that describes factors influencing international opportunity-related behaviors, their processes, and respective effects. Finally, the research offers theoretical and practical contributions.