The ongoing globalization poses significant challenges to the upper echelons of
organizations. As a result, companies search for different ways to increase the
information-processing capacity at the firm upper echelons and internationalize their
top management teams as a source of knowledge and expertise about managing firm
foreign operations. Unlike most previous studies conducted on American companies
and focusing on executives’ international experience only, this paper empirically tests
the proposition that top management team internationalization is a multi-dimensional
theoretical construct that relates to executive compensation, firm internationalization
and corporate performance. By drawing upon upper echelons and firm internationalization
theories, alternative causal models of the relationship between firm
internationalization, upper echelons internationalization and corporate performance
are proposed and empirically tested in a sample of Swiss publicly listed companies.
The findings confirm the validity of the conceptualized construct and suggest that top
management team internationalization is an important dimension of firm’s internationalization.
Furthermore, the empirical evidence suggests that TMT
internationalization has direct as well as indirect effects on corporate performance,
mediated through firm internationalization and executive compensation.