Top management teams, work experience diversity and the speed of international entrepreneurship: an upper echelons perspective

Building upon Upper Echelon theory, this paper investigates how work experience diversity in top management teams (TMTs) affects the speed of international entrepreneurship. We hypothesize that TMTs with higher work-experience diversity provide firms with richer human and social capital, which allows them to more quickly identify and take advantage of business opportunities in foreign markets. We also argue that this effect is amplified (weakened) when the CEO shares significant (little) functional experience with the TMT members. The results of fixed effects Poisson regressions on a longitudinal sample of 111 UK-based firms over an 11-year long period support our hypotheses.