Scholars of international business and strategic management have reached a consensus that in order to understand the behavior patterns of enterprises in the process of internationalization, it is necessary to focus on the micro-foundation of the strategic decisions that drive this process. However, the early life experiences of CEOs, as a decisive factor in their career behavior patterns and cognitive schemas, are often overlooked in current research on the antecedents of corporate internationalization strategy choices. To fill this critical research gap, this study aims to explore how an individuals’ military experience affects their choice of corporate internationalization strategy as a CEO. In particular, we focus on the trade-off between the scope and speed of corporate internationalization, which has been proven to be paradoxical in existing research. Combining the imprinting theory and the attention-based view (ABV), we argue that CEOs with military experience are influenced by military imprint and tend to identify and seize internationalization opportunities in a decentralized rather than more focused manner, which in turn positively affects the scope of internationalization and negatively affects the speed of internationalization. This effect is moderated by the degree of TMT foreign experience. Based on data from Chinese listed companies from 2008 to 2022, we empirically tested the above assumptions, thus contributing to current research related to internationalization from microfoundation, attention-based view and CEO military experience.
