ESCP Professor Stefan Schmid and Ph.D. graduate Dennis J. Wurster demonstrated that conflicting interests exist between high potentials who consider an international career and multinational corporations (MNCs) that should thus rethink the policies in place.
“International work experience is often claimed to be a prerequisite for managers in MNCs, but is it really accelerating the way to their management boards?” wonders Stefan Schmid, the head of ESCP’s Chair of International Management and Strategic Management (Berlin campus).
In an article co-authored with his former Ph.D. candidate and Research Assistant, Dennis J. Wurster, and published in the International Business Review, which was awarded the “Danny Van Den Bulcke Best Paper Prize” at the European International Business Academy (EIBA) conference, he investigated how international work experience affects those managers who reach upper echelons.
“Drawing on both human capital theory and elite theory, we argue that stays abroad not only have beneficial, but also adverse effects on managers’ ascent to the top,” he claims. By analysing the careers of 212 management board members from Germany, they found that once a certain threshold of international work experience is exceeded, being away from home impedes managers’ long-term career advancement.
Distance matters too
“However, it is not only long stays abroad that show a negative time effect: we also established that being in countries with high geographic and cultural distance to the home country significantly decelerates managers’ career advancement, measured by the time to the management board appointment,” Professor Schmid asserts.
The findings demonstrate that conflicting interests exist between MNCs and high potentials who consider an international career, which the authors stress should be solved in managerial practice. “This can make MNCs rethink the policies in place for developing talented managers who may be considered for taking over positions at the upper echelons of the firm...”
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