The Rise of Multinational Top Management Teams and Boards

As firms internationalise, they face increasingly complex environments and must learn to deal with the challenges that go along with the establishment of foreign operations. Appointing foreign directors at board and top management team level has been one way that firms have handled such challenges, as this enables the company to draw upon a larger knowledge-base at the top of the organisation and extends the company's international business networks. At the same time, this creates new challenges associated with integrating foreign nationals into established cultures, and generating the best possible performance for the company.

This project has adopted predominantly a quantitative approach, based on the construction and statistical analysis of large scale databases of leading companies in the world's most advanced economies. This work enables us to identify the determinants and consequences of the creation of multinational top management teams and boards. In addition, case study research is being carried out at companies to identify the process implications of creating multinational top management teams and boards.