Host-Country Nationals in Top Management Teams: A Microfoundational Perspective on Internationalization
Despite their distinctive host-country-specific abilities and position to influence the most consequential decisions affecting firms’ activities in specific host countries, host-country nationals (HCNs) in top management teams (TMTs) are surprisingly understudied in international business (IB) research. To help address this gap, we propose a microfoundational explanation of whether, how, and under what conditions HCNs influence firms’ host-country-specific internationalization, captured through country-specific foreign sales. We argue that HCNs affect firms’ host-country-specific foreign sales through their country-specific abilities and inclinations, which influence how TMTs with HCNs attend to, interpret, and act on issues arising in HCNs’ countries of origin. We further examine how host-country institutional quality and gender-discriminating institutions condition these effects. Using a sample of 30,015 observations capturing country-specific foreign sales and HCNs in TMTs of 2,048 firms in 146 host countries, we find that the presence of HCNs in TMTs is positively related to firms’ host-country-specific foreign sales, especially in host countries with low institutional quality. However, this positive relationship is weaker for female HCNs in host countries with more gender-discriminating institutions.
Dorota Piaskowska
Dorota Piaskowska is an Associate Professor of Strategy and International Business at University College Dublin, Ireland. She holds a PhD from Tilburg University in the Netherlands and has been a visiting scholar at Singapore Management University. Dorota’s research examines firm growth through scaling, internationalization, mergers and acquisitions, alliances, and joint ventures. She has a particular interest in the role of institutions, top managers’ experience, and learning in these processes. Her work has been published in Long Range Planning, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Business Research, British Journal of Management, and European Management Review, among other outlets. She has served on the Board of the European International Business Academy and in leadership roles at the Academy of Management. She currently serves on the editorial boards of International Business Review, where she received the 2025 Best Reviewer Award, International Journal of Management Reviews, Journal of World Business, and Management International Review. Dorota’s teaching experience spans all levels of higher education and countries such as Ireland, the Netherlands, Singapore, Hong Kong/China, and Finland. She also co-authored the Ivey Publishing case Ryanair: Flying Too Close to the Sun?, winner of The Case Centre’s 2021 Strategy and General Management Award and has held senior academic leadership roles in UCD’s Singapore and CEMS programmes. She led the latter to a seventh place globally in the Financial Times Masters in Management ranking in 2018.