This research explores the problems that firms encounter when expanding beyond their national borders (particularly, the problems of how to operate in foreign cultures) and how they learn to deal with these problems. The perspectives in this research build on organizational learning theory. Separate hypotheses have been developed for acquisitions and start-ups, alone or with partners (i.e., international joint ventures). Hypotheses have been tested using longitudinal data on 1,600 expansions of 25 large Dutch firms between 1966 and 1994. Recently, for instance, on which conditions favor radical change in organizations, or alternatively, incremental change. This research seeks to gain more insight into the mechanism of learning in organizations, but continues to be applied to the international business setting.

Learning from product and geographical diversity, acquisitions, and organizational growth and long-term survival.

Traditional streams of literature suggest that in the long run, firms are inert and lag behind changes in the environment (i.e., population ecology) or that long periods of incremental change are interpuncted by short periods of radical change (punctuated equilibrium theory) which allows the firm to synchronise to the environment again. Our stream of research builds on a more recent research development that recognizes that firms attune to their environment - and in the long run survive - by regular "shocks" to their system that infuse knowledge into the organization and counters inertia. Examples of "shocks" that have been studied in various research projects are entrances of firms into foreign product and/or geographical environments, and acquisitions that imply that the focal firm has to absorb firms with a different culture, strategies, systems, mental models, and so on. Evidence from longitudinal data on 1,600 expansions of 25 large Dutch firms between 1966-1994 confirms the general idea that firms that engage in such strategies face short-term costs but long-term gains, which appear to enhance their long-term survival.

Organizational culture, management style and organizational performance

This research program is concerned with leadership/management and organizational culture and performance. One empirical survey study in one of the largest Dutch banks, for example, shows that a balanced transformational top leadership style relates significantly to a small organizational culture gap as well as to high objective performance. Our findings suggest that, instead of striving towards a strong culture, a firm should concentrate on reducing the gap between preferred and perceived organizational culture. Another study, carried out among the employees of small and medium-sized professional service firms in The Netherlands and Germany shows that some internal firm resources (including various organizational practices and top managerial competence) explain significant performance variation. Current research is underway to refine the measurement taken in order to launch new studies with a focus on intra-organizational predictors of firm success.

This set of projects focuses on the way in which systems of management, trust relations, and national cultures interact. One project focused on African cultures and management. A pilot study in 14 countries has been performed. In the next stage, the instrument developed in this pilot study will be used in a 20+ country survey. Another project focused on national cultures and entrepreneurship. Using existing datasets, it can be shown that a substantial part of the differences in entrepreneurship levels between countries can be explained on the basis of differences between national cultures, even when all obvious economic variables are controlled for. A third project focused on international differences of goals in business. Data have been collected in eight countries and are now being analyzed.

This research program seeks to map technological trajectories in relation to strategic conduct. Firms produce discontinuities in technological trajectories through conduct ranging from R&D investments to creation of inter-firm alliances which connects complementary technologies and other assets. One study examines the evolution of tennis racket technology which has shown four successive dominant designs since the early 1970s. In this study we combine firm conduct with consumer behavior. Innovations which at an earlier time were not well received, diffused widely during a later period. A similar study is underway in stereo and sound systems in which the product architecture is examined in reference to the configuration of firms and their divisions within certain value chains. Institutional factors complement market factors as shaping the selection environment of new products and services. A third study explores technological convergence around digital imaging. Joint ventures and acquisitions are traced to show that convergence between multiple strands of technology or industry classes emerges as the results of collaborative conduct and social capital of organizations.

This research looks at exits of American manufacturing affiliates of foreign investors, to better understand the causes, circumstances, timing, and determinants of exits (both through sales and through liquidations/bankruptcies). Exits of business units result from a variety of factors, and one part of the project seeks to develop a typology of exits by tracing down all exits (as of 1998) from the population of all Japanese affiliates manufacturing in the United States in 1980 and building up a comprehensive documentation on the circumstances and motives for all these exits. Another way to understand exits is to compare exit rates and exit hazard functions of US affiliates of parents based in different countries. The project has pooled databases of Japanese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish firms to see whether parents based in countries which were culturally further from the US had higher exit rates. The impact of cultural distance on exits has also been investigated by comparing the survival in the US of Japanese-Japanese and Japanese-American manufacturing joint ventures. An ongoing project looks at the timing of exits, and investigates whether there are systematic differences in the time pattern of exits of US based affiliates of Japanese and North European parents (as reflected in each country's hazard function).