Does Family Involvement Matter for Internationalization of Firms? An Investigation of Indian EMNCs

Emerging Multinationals (EMNEs) have attracted significant research attention in the recent years so are the internationalizing family firms (FFs) for being embedded in unique contexts - country for the former and family for the later. As FFs constitute a significant proportion of the EMNEs in some big emerging economies like India, drawing from both research streams, we investigate how family owned EMNEs differ from non-family EMNEs and how the heterogeneity of family owned EMNEs explains the full spectrum of internationalization of family owned EMNEs - spanning from lower commitment mode of exports to higher commitment mode of overseas foreign direct investments and subsidiary formations. Anchoring our research in the socioemtional wealth perspective in family business literature and behavioral risk taking theory we theorize how family owned EMNEs would differ in their internationalization trajectories from the non family owned EMNEs and how non-family professional managers shape the internationalization trajectories of family owned EMNEs differently as compared to those led by owner- managers. We test our predictions using a proprietary, longitudinal panel data set of 213 EMNEs from India featuring in the S&P BSE 500 index covering a six year period from 2007-08 to 2012-13. We report general empirical support for most of our predictions.