Under the background of resource dependence, it is of great significance to study the emerging market multinationals’ (EMNEs) entry mode into international market. How do complementary assets and expansion opportunities in a host country market influence the EMNEs executive’s entry mode choice? We adopt policy capture method to designed questionnaire and administered to high-level EMNEs executives in China. The results show that the availability of complementary assets in the host country market have a positive influence on EMNEs executives’ evolutionary and leapfrog entry modes choice, and EMNEs executives’ preferences for leapfrog mode over evolutionary mode is positively related to the host country’s complementary assets. The expansion opportunities in the host country market have a positive influence on EMNEs executives’ evolutionary and leapfrog entry modes choice. This shows that expansion opportunities in the host country market have a similar degree of attraction for executives’ evolutionary and leapfrog modes. Unlike most current studies, which advocate that leapfrog is mainly used to obtain international assets, while evolutionary approach is more suitable for seeking international opportunities. This paper shows that the opportunity factors play the same important role as assets factors in promoting EMNEs executives’ springboard behavior. It also reveals the ambidexterity logic in EMNEs executives’ decision-making process.

PurposeBoth the scope of postentry growth and the scale of postentry growth are essential for Chinese multinational enterprises' aggressive internationalization. Yet, prior literature has not considered the synergistic approach of postentry growth that seeks the scope of growth and the scale of growth simultaneously. Building upon the embeddedness perspective and the learning view, we address how structural embeddedness directly affects firms' postentry growth in the form of scope and scale and indirectly affects postentry growth via both the scope of growth and the scale of growth. Particularly, we investigate the decreasing mediating effect of the growth's scale on the growth's scope when embeddedness strengthens.Design/methodology/approachWith a survey data set of 206 Chinese multinational firms from manufacturing and service industries, we conduct structural equation modeling (SEM), partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM), instantaneous indirect effect assessment and hierarchical linear regression model to test our hypotheses.FindingsFirst, Chinese multinational enterprises’ (CMNEs) structural embeddedness is positively related to their scope of postentry growth, while has a U-shaped relationship with their scale of postentry growth. Second, CMNEs' scope of postentry growth mediates the relationship between structural embeddedness and the scale of postentry growth, the mediation effect counts for 33.5% of the over effect. Finally, the indirect effect of structural embeddedness on the scope of postentry growth through the scale of postentry growth is nonlinear. As the structural embeddedness strengthens, the positive indirect effect gradually weakens.Originality/valueWe believe this study further connects core international business research on postentry growth to the fast-growing literature on emerging markets multinational enterprises' internationalization. In addition, we undertake an initial effort in addressing an important gap in the literature: how structural embeddedness matters to firms' postentry growth. Moreover, this study finds important evidence to support the direct and indirect effect of structural embeddedness on postentry growth.

In the realm of organizational cooperation, the choice of benefit behaviors has a profound impact on the sustainability of the collaboration. The influence of trust relationships on firms’ decisions regarding private versus common benefit behaviors has been a subject of debate among researchers. To address this debate, we propose and test an analytical framework that acknowledges the presence of two fundamental dimensions in partner relationships: calculative trust and relational trust. Through the utilization of a policy-capturing approach, we rigorously examine and validate our hypotheses at a mechanistic level. Our findings indicate that both calculative trust and relational trust increase the likelihood of firms adopting both private and common benefit behaviors. Furthermore, in terms of comparative choices between private and common benefit behaviors, calculative trust exerts a stronger influence on firms’ preference for private benefit, while relational trust has a stronger impact on firms’ preference for common benefit. Lastly, we discuss the theoretical and empirical implications arising from the results of this study.