Internationalization, Strategic Slack Resources, and Firm Performance: The Case Study of Vietnamese Enterprises

Abstract

The study attempted to fill a gap in the research on international business by providing fresh evidence of the effect of the degree of internationalization on firm performance and the influence of organizational slack on this relationship. By applying a fixed-effects model to data from 569,767 Vietnamese enterprises from 2007 to 2015, a significant W-shaped linkage between internationalization and firm performance was revealed. Importantly, the results also emphasized the importance of three types of slack in the first stage of the internationalization process: absorbed slack human resources, other absorbed slack resources, and unabsorbed slack resources.