Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face significant challenges in overcoming internationalization barriers, including the liability of foreignness and outsidership. Although the potential competencies of migrants in SMEs are often overlooked, our study demonstrates how their ability to develop and access informal networks in their home countries can be crucial for successful SME internationalization. By integrating insights from informal network and relational boundary-spanning research into SME internationalization theory and drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with migrant managers from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region working in French SMEs, we identify three key migrant roles: “accelerator,” “facilitator,” and “sustainer” These roles enable migrants to overcome barriers to entering MENA markets, facilitating and sustaining business development. Our findings advance SME internationalization theory by refining the importance that a distinct type of informal network (i.e., wasta, a culturally embedded informal network pervasive in MENA countries) plays, , and highlighting the migrant-owned competencies necessary to activate and utilize wasta, which are critical for SME international expansion in the MENA region.

We investigate consumers’ stereotypes and service quality expectations of employees with a local vs. non-local accent when visiting a foreign country as tourists. Furthermore, we account for consumer- (home country, cultural openness) and situation-specific (accent–service cultural congruence) boundary conditions. For this purpose, we conducted a 3 x 2 online experiment with Austrians and Mexicans and audio scenarios as stimuli. Results suggest that negative social stereotypes (Mexicans look down on Mexican migrant employees abroad) overshadow in-group national favoritism, but that service expectations are unaffected by this. Accent–service cultural congruence plays an important role in this context. The moderating role of tourists’ cultural open-mindedness depends on their home country and the considered stereotype dimensions (i.e., superiority, attractiveness, or dynamism). This work is the first attempt at exploring employee accent effects among international visitors of a country. By suggesting that Mexican tourists appear to look down on Mexican migrant employees abroad despite originally being from the same country, our findings call for a multifaceted and more nuanced view of the in-group/out-group dichotomy. It appears that social distance perceptions sometimes outweigh cultural closeness perceptions in the classification of others, which yields important implications for frontline personnel management in culturally diverse firms.

With an influx of highly educated migrants comes an increase in cultural breadth, ideas, and perspectives in organizations, which in turn is linked to a variety of positive effects and outcomes, such as innovation. In this paper, we study highly educated migrant innovativeness. Building on the idea that migrants’ experiences prior to migration, specifically their exposure to hardships and lack of opportunities (what we refer to as “developmental deprivation”) may be a driving force behind generating novel and useful ideas in their destination countries. We draw on self-determination theory and decision-making inclusion literature to develop our hypotheses, which are supported in a study of highly educated migrants from 45 countries working in the private and public sectors of Sweden. First and foremost, there is a significant relationship between high levels of developmental deprivation and high levels of innovativeness in the destination country. In addition, to be included in decision-making is critical for high innovativeness among those migrants who have not experienced developmental deprivation to any larger degree. However, for those who have experienced developmental deprivation in their origin country, their innovativeness is higher at low levels of decision-making inclusion. Contributions, limitations and future research are discussed before concluding the paper.

The managerial labor market is becoming increasingly global, but whether and how managers' home countries affect their evaluations remains unclear. This article argues that the status of a manager's home country affects the likelihood of that manager being dismissed. Managerial performance is difficult to assess, and employers often rely on organizational performance cues to evaluate managers. To what extent managers cause a performance shortfall, however, is ambiguous. Due to this causal ambiguity, we argue that employers tend to rely on ascribed status as a proxy for managerial ability. Managers from high-status countries may, in turn, be held to a lower performance standard than managers from low-status countries. In the event of a performance shortfall, managers from low-status countries may thus be more likely to be dismissed than equally performing managers from high-status countries. We test this hypothesis using data from the German men's football league, the Bundesliga. Our findings suggest that ascribed status plays a significant role in managerial dismissal decisions. However, our findings also suggest that this home country status bias weakens with employers' exposure to migrant workers.