Political Ideology in Internationalization Research and International Business.

For nearly fifty-years, international business (IB) research has long acknowledged the role of managerial characteristics as a driver of multinational success. Yet existing perspectives in this research stream has remained fairly limited, casting Multinational Corporation (MNC) managers' perceptions, demographic characteristics, and risk preferences as dominant and unique for guiding decisions. Largely absent is a consideration of the role of managers' values by which managers' decision-making process is driven -- rendering prior literature incomplete for understanding the role of managers' values in the intensive and information-overloaded decision-making environment. Integrating different strands of literature on political ideology from strategy and political science fields with the firm internationalization research, the current paper illustrates the importance of managerial values by offering a theoretical model of how managers' political ideology plays out in influencing internationalization decisions situated at different stages, backed by set of propositions. It highlights the need for IB scholars to consider managers' value as a crucial predictor and systematically brings the notion of managers values into the IB space. The article concludes with drawing implications for future IB research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]