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Strategic resource decisions to enhance the performance of global engineering services
journal contribution
posted on 2019-06-17, 09:34 authored by Yufeng Zhang, Zhibo Yang, Tao ZhangTao ZhangThis paper extends our understanding of the internationalisation and firm performance (I-FP) relationship of service firms by considering the influence of strategic decisions on three types of slack resources. The research focusses on an important type of service operations − global engineering services, which are a major part of the global economy and represent a distinctive business model in the contemporary business environment. In doing so, we theorise the I-FP relationship by addressing the knowledge-intensive, project-based and people-centric features of engineering service firms (ESFs); and test the relationship with a carefully assembled dataset containing 12 years’ data from 242 ESFs. We identify a negative overall I-FP relationship, i.e. ESFs’ international expansion leads to worse financial performance in general. The presence of slack resources explains why such a result exists. Our findings have significant implications, both for future research on internationalisation and performance and for firms to effectively deploy their resources to support global service operations in a strategic manner.
Funding
Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union through Marie Curie Actions IRSES Europe-China High Value Engineering Network (EC-HVEN) under Grant Number PIRSES-GA-2011-295130; and the National Social Science Fund of China for Young Scholars under Grant Number 13CGL010.
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Published in
International Business ReviewVolume
27Issue
3Pages
678 - 700Citation
ZHANG, Y., YANG, Z. and ZHANG, T., 2017. Strategic resource decisions to enhance the performance of global engineering services. International Business Review, 27 (3), pp.678-700.Publisher
© ElsevierVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-11-27Publication date
2017-12-06Copyright date
2018Notes
This paper is closed access.ISSN
0969-5931Publisher version
Language
- en
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