MICROFOUNDATIONS OF DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS: INSIGHTS FROM TWO COMPLEMENTARY STUDIES

Tez Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi, İşletme Fakültesi, Uluslararası Ticaret ve İşletmecilik Bölümü, Türkiye

Tez Danışmanı: Alev Katrinli

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2022

Tezin Dili: Türkçe

Özet:

With the aim to advance the literature of emerging microfoundations view, the core premise of this dissertation is to unveil the sources of firm dynamic capabilities and respectively superior firm export performance through disintegrating the collective constructs (higher level) into lower-level sources, which can elucidate how collective outcomes (such as firm performance) are generated and developed throughout the firm. By doing so, a comprehensive understanding of the underlying reason behind the heterogeneity among firms is developed. In other words, this study highlights the overshadowed roles of individual actions and interactions as micro-level (lower-level) sources of macro (collective) constructs within the context of international business. Providing two complementary empirical studies, this research points out the critical role of export department employees on the development of firm dynamic capabilities that ignite superior firm export performance. In this vein, the results reveal that organizational citizenship behaviors of export department employees foster exporting firms’ engagement in market orientation. Particularly, employees with challenging oriented citizenship behaviors can contribute to exporting firms’ market orientation only under the psychologically safe working environment while affiliative oriented citizenship behaviors contribute to firm market orientation regardless of the moderation effect of psychological safety. Besides, in virtue of market orientation, exporting firms can achieve superior performance and outperform their rivals, as expected.