International Venture Capital Firms Syndication and Performance: A Social Network Perspective

Despite a growing body of research on venture capital firms, the process by which venture capital firms invest across borders remains unclear. This three-essay dissertation integrates the literature on venture capital firms, social network theory, and international alliances to examine following research questions: 1) How do network characteristics (i.e., structure and composition) of the international venture capital firms and their potential partners impact their syndication behavior? 2) What configurations of the ventures\u27 and the international venture capital firms\u27 attributes is associated with syndication in emerging markets? and 3) Does the host country influence the international venture capital firms\u27 syndication behavior and performance? While there is a plethora of empirical studies on domestic venture capital activities and cross country comparison of the venture capital industry, there is a lack of research that looks at the process of the venture capital firms\u27 international investments and explores the factors that influence the process of such investments. Essay I addresses this gap by developing a theoretical framework examining how network structure and composition of the both focal foreign venture capital firms potential partners operating in the host country can impact their syndication behavior. The major network constructs constituting the framework are network centrality, density, and diversity. The theoretical argument suggests that all of these factors can play a significant role in the venture capital firms\u27 decision with regard to syndication. The major contribution of this essay is introducing the network attributes as the antecedent mechanisms impacting the syndication likelihood. Also, this study expands the level of the analysis in this literature, from the firm to its network. Essay II examines how venture s\u27 risk factors (information asymmetry and technical complexity) and venture capital firms attributes (social status in the home and host countries and general and host country experiences) configure in syndicated deals applying fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The results show that the venture riskiness is a more important factor driving the syndication decision compared to the venture capital firm\u27s capabilities (identified through the social status and experience). Further, the venture capital firms\u27 capabilities do not substitute the syndication. In other words, even firms with high social status and significant experience are willing to syndicate their investments. Finally, I found that while syndication is not systematically associated with high performance, lack of syndication is associated with low performance. This result reveals the vital role of partner selection in the venture capital syndications. Theoretically, my results lend more support to the assumption that syndication is not significantly contingent upon the venture and venture capital attributes, and other motivations such as portfolio diversification and future reciprocation are more likely to drive the syndication decision. Essay III aims to examine whether venture capital firms alter their syndication strategy according to the host country attributes. The second research question in this essay is whether the performance of international venture capital firms systematically varies when they invest in different countries. Results provide support for the overall significant country effect on the syndication decision. Whether venture capital firms syndicate their investment or not is systematically and partially explained by the host country characteristics. The type of partner (domestic versus home country) also partially depends on the host country. Interestingly, the host country explains more variation of syndication with home country partners compared to domestic firms. Further, I found that the performance of the venture capital firms\u27 international investments varies with the variation of the host country. The host country effect is significantly greater when the foreign firms only syndicate with the domestic partners. There are also more fine grained analyses whose results have been presented in this essay. Thus, this essay contributes to the theory and practice by revealing the significant effect of the host country on the international venture capital firms strategy and performance. Results of this essay open new venues for future studies and shed light on the plausible directions for the future research investigating the phenomenon of the venture capital firms\u27 internationalization

Psychological Safety: A Meta‐Analytic Review and Extension

Although psychological safety research has flourished in recent years, and despite the empirical support for the important role of psychological safety in the workplace, several critical questions remain. In order to address these questions, we aggregate theoretical and empirical works, and draw on 136 independent samples representing over 22,000 individuals and nearly 5,000 groups, to conduct a comprehensivemeta-analysis on the antecedents and outcomes of psychological safety. We not only present the nomological network of psychological safety but also extend this research in 4 important ways. First, we compare effect sizes to determine the relative effectiveness of antecedents to psychological safety. Second, we examine the extent to which psychological safety influences both task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors over and beyond related concepts such as positive leader relations and work engagement. Third, we examine whether research design characteristics and national culture alter validities within the nomological network, thus promoting a more accurate and contextualized understanding of psychological safety. Finally, we test the homology assumption by comparing the effect sizes of the antecedents and outcomes of psychological safety across individual and group levels of analysis. We conclude with a discussion of the areas in need of future examination

Major trends in knowledge management research:a bibliometric study

This study provides an overview of the knowledge management literature from 1980 through 2014. We employ bibliometric and text mining analyses on a sample of 500 most cited articles to examine the impact of factors such as number of authors, references, pages, and keywords on the number of citations that they received. We also investigate major trends in knowledge management literature including the contribution of different countries, variations across publication years, and identifying active research areas and major journal outlets. Our study serves as a resource for future studies by shedding light on how trends in knowledge management research have evolved over time and demonstrating the characteristics of the most cited articles in this literature. Specifically, our results reveal that the most cited articles are from United States and United Kingdom. The most prolific year in terms of the number of published articles is 2009 and in terms of the number of citations is 2012. We also found a positive relationship between the number of publications’ keywords, references, and pages and the number of citations that they have received. Finally, the Journal of Knowledge Management has the largest share in publishing the most cited articles in this field