Performance or friends?: orientations in internationalization relationship choices

Relationships are known to have a critical role in the internationalization process, but research has not addressed the effect of national culture on international entrepreneur's decision making towards their relationship networks. Here we consider the effect of individual and collective values towards relationships and towards people, on the nature of relationships that IEs form and use in their firm's internationalization. We develop a research model that examines the potential value of a party as a relationship that will help an IE in internationalization on two dimensions: the strength of the relationship with the IE, and the embeddedness of the party concerned in foreign territories. We explore the relationship between performance orientation and the types of relationships that IEs develop in fourteen case study technology IEs, seven based in a high performance society and seven based in a society with more person-oriented values. We find that the individual performance-orientation of an IE appears to influence the strength of relationships that they are willing to work with. Those with stronger performance orientation are more comfortable working with weak relationships with people they do not know well and trust so long as the parties concerned are useful by being well embedded in foreign markets. Those that are more people-oriented need to work with strong relationships, which may not be so useful for internationalization. National value orientations also seem to moderate how IEs develop relationships, which suggests that national orientations have a moderating effect on the internationalizing relationships that IEs develop and use.