CEOs' international experience: Welcome or unsolicited?

Abstract

International Business (IB) literature has often stressed that international experience is a key requirement for MNCs' employees and managers, especially for top managers such as CEOs. But is international experience also instrumental for a CEO to obtain board memberships in other firms? To answer this question, we investigate the association between CEOs' international experience and their board memberships. This is warranted because, in many countries, CEOs' board memberships are critically discussed, and yet their antecedents are poorly understood. Drawing on human capital theory and resource dependence theory, we take a differentiated view on international experience, and we ask whether longer, later, and broader international experience increases a CEO's board memberships. Furthermore, we analyze the moderating effects of additional important CEO characteristics, i.e., tenure, age, and gender. Based on detailed, hand-collected data on the careers of European FT500 CEOs, our empirical analyses reveal late-career international experience as being positively associated with board memberships. Interestingly, longer and broader international experience negatively affects board memberships. To better understand these surprising results, we differentiate between board memberships at home and abroad to show that international experience negatively influences domestic board memberships. We find a positive moderating role of age but not of tenure and gender. Our study challenges prevalent assumptions about the value of international experience, revealing that antecedents of board memberships could differ depending on the environment.