Organizational Contexts of Human Capital: Hiring MNC Employees and Exporting in Domestic Firms

Starting to export is a crucial but risky step for the growth strategy of most firms. Hiring managers with international experience can propel export decisions but we know little about where domestic firms find this expertise and whether it can be fruitfully applied in their context. We integrate theoretical mechanisms from the transferability of strategic human capital into models explaining export decisions. We theorize that hiring managers from MNCs increases the odds of domestic firms to start exporting and this effect benefits from similarities in the organizational context of the hiring firm with MNCs. We hypothesize that young firms, without international diversity in the workforce and flat hierarchies will benefit comparatively less from hiring MNC managers because the conditions for transfers of human capital are too dissimilar. We test and support these hypotheses for 159,680 domestic firms in Sweden, their hiring and export decisions between 2010 and 2015.