Career advancement in large organizations in Europe and the United States: do international assignments add value?

Abstract

We look at the relationship between the number of assignments, the length of international assignment experience, the type of employer commissioning the international assignment, the individual's career stage at the first assignment, and career advancement: the time that the executives took to be appointed to the CEO position from the start of their career. Our sample of 1001 chief executives, based in 23 countries and affiliated with the 500 largest corporations in Europe and the 500 largest in the United States, allows us to examine important individual- and organization-level contingencies that affect the relationship between international assignment experience and career advancement. We find that international experience slows the executives' ascent to the top, longer assignments and a larger number of assignments being detrimental to their speed of ascent to top corporate positions. Further, international assignments at corporations other than the CEOs' current employer and assignments taken at later stages of executives' careers damage career advancement.

Keywords:

• career success
• chief executives
• international experience

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants of the EGOS 2007 conference in Vienna for their feedback on this article. Comments from Yehuda Baruch, Samy Dana, Michael Dickmann, Luis Gomez-Mejia, Konstantin Korotov, Julia Richardson and the anonymous reviewer are also greatly appreciated. Monika Hamori is grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science for providing the SEJ2006-10915/ECON grant and also the European Commission for providing the Marie Curie International Reintegration grant.

Notes

1. To address this issue, we have collected additional data for 91 randomly-chosen CEOs in our sample from the website www.zoominfo.com., which provides biographical information on managers and executives. Besides the biographies, the website also provides the number of ‘references’ or information sources that it used to generate the biography for each executive. The more references are used to create the biography of an executive, the greater is the likelihood that the biographical information on the executive is accurate and the problem of undercounting international assignments does not exist.

For each of the 91 CEOs, we first collected the number of information sources that were used to generate the biographies. Based on the number of information sources, we sorted the CEOs into four groups of equal size. Then, we ran one-way ANOVA to see if there are differences between the four groups with respect to the four key variables we use in our study: international experience (0/1), length of international experience, the number of international assignments and age at first assignment. Results available from the authors upon request show that there are no significant between-group differences between the four groups for any of these key variables. As we tested these relationships by increasing the number of groups to seven, the results still held.