持续推进更高水平的对外开放是融入国际经济大循环的重要战略，把握好国际化速度对跨国企业海外投资布局具有重要现实价值。利用2010—2020年中国上市公司对外投资数据，探讨业绩期望落差对企业国际化速度的影响及作用机制。结果表明，业绩期望落差对企业国际化速度具有正向影响；企业风险承担水平是业绩期望落差影响国际化速度的重要机制。进一步研究发现，行业期望落差对企业国际化速度的促进作用更为显著；高管团队海外背景异质性情境下，业绩期望落差对企业国际化速度的影响更为显著。结论对提高跨国企业海外投资效率和海外经营稳定性具有一定的启示。

Speed has become an important factor for multinational enterprises to gain new competitive advantages so as to seize the opportunity of economic catch-up in the complex and changing international environment. It is a challenge for decision-makers to optimize internationalization speed. The theory of firm behavior provides a new lens to solve this problem, asserting that enterprises will adjust their strategic decisions according to a specific reference point for performance expectations. In fact, enterprises with different resource endowments make different strategic adjustments when they face performance expectation gaps. It is a topic worth pondering whether decision-makers should adopt the coping strategy of "making changes after poverty" or "sticking to the rules". For enterprises with performance expectation gaps, accelerating the speed of internationalization is representative of risky activity, and it is also an important way to optimize the investment layout and enhance the value of enterprises. Therefore, it is the most convenient choice for enterprises to alleviate financial difficulties by creating new advantages in international competition through rapid internationalization. Meanwhile, according to enterprise behavior theory and prospect theory, managers' willingness to take risks will increase with the increase in performance pressure, thus accelerating the internationalization of enterprises.
In this context, this paper starts with the adjustment of corporate strategic decisions in the context of performance feedback and makes an empirical test by matching the overseas investment data from 2010 to 2020 from multiple databases, focusing on the mechanism of the impact of the performance expectation gap on the internationalization speed of enterprises. The research results show that the performance expectation gap has a significant positive impact on the speed of internationalization. The level of risk-taking by enterprises plays a part in the relationship between the performance expectation gap and the speed of internationalization. Further research confirms that the industry expectation gap plays a more obvious role in promoting the speed of internationalization. Along with the higher heterogeneity of executives’ overseas backgrounds, the impact of the gap in performance expectations on the speed of internationalization is more obvious. The above conclusions still hold after a series of robustness tests.
The research conclusions provide theoretical value for making an in-depth exploitation into the decision-making influence mechanism of internationalization speed. First, this paper introduces risk taking into the research framework to analyze the mediating role of risk taking level between performance expectation gap and internationalization speed, extending the relevant studies on the relationship between performance feedback and internationalization speed. Second, this study employs firm behavior theory and prospect theory to analyze the firm's strategic decision-adjustment behavior against the expectation gap dilemma, and in this setting, enterprises tend to accelerate the internationalization of positive strategic adjustment, and thus the study enriches the theory of corporate behavior and the corresponding organizational response behavior. Third, this study takes the heterogeneity of the overseas background of the executive team as the influencing factor of the heterogeneity of the internationalization behavior of the firm, which enriches the research on the situational mechanisms of the performance expectation gap and internationalization speed.
The conclusions provide reference for improving the efficiency of overseas investment and the stability of overseas operations. First, corporate decision-makers should pay full attention to the signal feedback of the performance gap, and alleviate the dilemmas by adjusting strategic decisions reasonably. Second, in order to improve the heterogeneity of the overseas background of the senior management team and the enterprise's risk-bearing ability, enterprises should improve the construction of the selection mechanism of the senior management team and pay attention to the accumulation of their own resources. In addition, the stakeholders of enterprises should improve their understanding of the managers' cognition and decision-making mechanisms reflected behind the enterprise's operation and management strategy, improve the internal and external supervision mechanisms of enterprises, and give managers certain fault-tolerance space to improve their risk-bearing ability. Third, the government should actively implement support or subsidy policies for enterprises to avoid blind expansion caused by performance pressure,increase government subsidies to attract overseas talents, and improve the proportion of management talents with international vision in the senior management team to optimize the overseas investment layout and performance of multinational enterprises.