Executive international experience and firm performance: the moderating effect of country and regional match.

Scant attention has been devoted to team international experience and firm performance. This paper offers a novel perspective by focusing on the relationship between top management team international experience and performance to study the moderating effect of the alignment of team international experience and firm international presence. Leveraging a dataset of Dutch and Swiss international companies over the five-year period from 2008-2012, for a total of 219 firm-year combinations, we found that firm performance has a U-shaped relationship with top management team international experience and changes concavity when the moderating effect of region TMT-firm match is included. These findings allow for a better understanding of international experience team dynamics and shed new light on the performance effects of international experience. Managerial and team diversity implications are discussed, together with opportunities for future research.