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The objective of this paper is to determine whether international entry‐order strategies by Korean chaebols affect the exit of their foreign subsidiaries.

The sample consists of a set of 61 parent firms and their 500 foreign subsidiaries. The sample includes 27 Korean business groups, called chaebols, and spans 51 markets, during the period from 1999 to 2004. The study employs resource‐ and knowledge‐based views, and is based on the Cox's proportional hazard model.

This study leads to two main findings: in the context of Korean business groups, latecomers in international markets have greater survival rates than pioneers do because latecomers have stronger resource commitments; and, nonetheless, if chaebol pioneers have greater competitive advantages than chaebol latecomers, the pioneers' subsidiaries have better survival rates than do those of latecomers.

The analysis advances order‐of‐entry research by exploring the international order‐of‐entry strategies of chaebol multinationals and their impact on international exit and the interrelationship between the order‐of‐entry and core competencies of chaebol multinationals.

The purpose of this paper is to address the question of how regional diversification affects subsidiary staffing composition in multinational enterprises. Another important objective of this study is to examine the effects of institutional distance, specifically regulative and normative distances, on foreign subsidiary staffing composition.

To estimate firm- and country-level parameters simultaneously, hierarchical linear modeling was conducted on a sample of 1,068 foreign subsidiaries of South Korean firms operating in 25 countries in 2014.

The results reveal that intra-regional diversification has a positive effect, whereas inter-regional diversification has a negative effect on local staffing in foreign subsidiaries. In addition, there is a positive association between informal distance (such as normative distance) and local staffing of foreign subsidiaries, while formal distance (such as regulative distance) is negatively related to local staffing of foreign subsidiaries.

The cross-sectional nature of the data in this study may preclude examination of the relationships among institutional distance, institutional environment, and subsidiary staffing composition. The authors suggest that future researchers employ a longitudinal design to examine the effects on staffing composition of institutional distance and institutional environments over time.

The paper contributes to the literature on international human resources management by highlighting the importance of combining multilevel parameters to improve assessment of the importance of firms’ competitive strategy and institutional environments in local staffing in foreign subsidiaries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Korean multinational corporations (MNCs) in the electronics and steel industries do shift their production across their foreign subsidiaries, located in different countries, as exchange rates fluctuate in foreign countries.

A case study was taken as a qualitative methodology to examine whether MNCs actually shift their production as multinational operational flexibility perspective predicts.

From a case study of two Korean MNCs (LG Electronics and POSCO), it was found that even facing heightened production costs associated with host country currency appreciation, Korean MNCs do not shift their production to less costly locations due to industrial characteristics, limited capacity, and high tariff barriers. It was also found that they reduce the production costs internally and they also negotiate the costs with employees and suppliers to adjust the production costs associated with appreciated currency.

Our findings imply that certain industrial and environmental constraints make it difficult for MNCs to take flexible actions as multinational operational flexibility perspective predicts. The findings also shed additional light on the less‐explored argument over operational flexibility and vertical integration associated with cross‐country shifts of value chain activities, including production or sales.

Almost all literature taking the multinational operation flexibility view argues that MNCs are able to shift their productions for their own benefits. However, the authors of this paper find from their case studies that firms take advantage of other methods than production shifts in their responses to exchange rate fluctuations in their host countries. Thus this study gives an insight into when and how firms behave as the theory predicts.