Export market experience, relational capital, and export performance in the context of different levels of psychic distance
Export market experience, relational capital, and export performance in the context of different levels of psychic distance

Summary/Abstract: Objective: The objective of the article is to identify differences in the explanatory value of export market expe-rience and relational capital as variables impacting export performance on markets characterised by high andlow levels of psychic distance. We aimed to explore which of these resources turn out to be more useful in dealingwith high and low levels of psychic distance between the exporter’s home country and export markets.Research Design & Methods: The research is quantitative and based on primary data collected from ex-porting firms representing different manufacturing sectors, which have a track record of export marketrelationships using computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) in 2020. We ran ordinary least squaresregression (OLS) analyses with IBM SPSS 23 software.Findings: The exporters’ market-specific relational capital positively affects export performance, wherebythis relationship is stronger for more distant markets. The impact of experience understood as tenure inthe export market turned out to be insignificant for export performance.Implications & Recommendations: Exporters can leverage their relational capital to enhance export marketperformance instead of acquiring market-specific knowledge on their own. Since an overreliance on a foreignpartner’s resources may prevent the development of own capabilities, an approach relying on joint experien-tial learning seems more advisable. Our findings also suggest that tenure in an export market in itself does notguarantee superior performance, as the learning exposure in the foreign markets has to be given.Contribution & Value Added: We explore the relationships between a set of variables proposed by differ-ent theoretical views explaining export performance. The originality of our approach lies in the strategicoptics we shed on firms’ behaviour in high and low psychic distance markets. Depending on the contextualdifferences stemming from the level of psychic distance of markets firms strategise their presence in for-eign markets deliberately relying on either their experience or market-specific relational capital.

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