Data Collection

The very first part of the data collection starts with the quantitative questionnaire which is designed based on the broadly used scale for each characteristic. To be able to quantify the level of each characteristic, the questionnaire follows the Likert-Scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) for each characteristic, except financial resources (slack) with the scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The organisational sequencing strategies are measured by the quantity mentioned during the qualitative interviews, thus, it will be discussed in the qualitative interview part.

The selection of appropriate scale was, however, highly challenging because it should be able to represent the purpose of the research sufficiently: The prominent scales for measuring global mindset normally concentrate on the individual level which could be used as the indicator of global mindset level of individuals or managers in an organisation. Accordingly, the scale for measuring the global mindset in organisational level is not yet adequately established. The only scale which could be used appropriately for the given research – that focuses more on the organisational level of global mindset – might be the scale designed by Gupta and Govindarajan (2001; 2002). It investigates the organisational global mindset in terms of the ability of emerging global opportunity recognition, importance of global customers for their business, existence of the worldwide talent pool within the organisation and competitiveness toward global competitors. There was a minor adjustment in the scale formulation to be able to conduct more smooth examining, while the main sense of the scale remains the same (see Table 1 in Appendix 1).

For choosing the appropriate scale for cultural intelligence, the coverage of the scale has been considered specifically. Because the term ‘culture’ could include various aspects, it was crucial to be able to limit the scope of the term, but also to cover the diverse aspects of the characteristic into the scale as the same time. From that reason, the scale provided by Ang et al. (2007) is selected for the questionnaire. It investigates the level of cultural intelligence in four different categories – metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioural cultural intelligence, thus, the given scale measures the organisational cultural intelligence regarding the amount of knowledge possession within an organisation, ability to cultural interaction and behaviour in cross-cultural circumstances (see Table 3 in Appendix 2).

From the literature review, it was recognisable that both terms ‘learning orientation’ of organisation and ‘organisation learning’ have been very often used as synonym. However, both should be clearly defined differently because ‘learning orientation’ actually represents the organisational learning process, while ‘organisational learning’ could consist of organisational learning process and organisational learning behaviour, as explained in the literature review part. Hence, it was crucial to provide the differentiated and minimized scope of organisational learning through the scale of learning orientation. For that reason, the scale designed by Sinkula et al. (1997) is used to measure the level of learning orientation of the sample. Among six sub-categories, the first three – commitment to learning, shared vision and open mindedness – have been considered as pivotal sub-categories,

consequently, play the vital role to design the qualitative interview in the further research step as well (see Table 5 in Appendix 3).

As it is shown from the cultural intelligence scale selection, the term network competence also covers a highly diverse dimension, consequently, providing a research boundary that might have an appropriate scope was vastly important for the characteristic network competence as well. Hence, the measurement provided by Ritter (2002) has been applied which measures the organisational network competence through the form of business relationships, way of communication with existing network partners and diverse canals to win new network stakeholders (see Table 7 in Appendix 4).

Last but not least, the scale designed by Danneels (2008) has been applied for the characteristic financial resources (slack) because it represents the meaning of financial resources in the context of internationalisation and market entry (see Table 9 in Appendix 5).

Overall, the given scales support the research to provide a specified and focused research boundary, since all five characteristics include huge range of research spectrums in its terminology. Also, choosing the scales open the opportunity to integrate these aspects into the qualitative interview which is aligned with the questionnaire content wise.

4.3.2. Qualitative Interview

As the advantage of triangulation demonstrates, a qualitative interview has been designed as a supplement to the quantitative questionnaire. It enables to investigate about more subjective perception of interviewees towards their organisations and receive more dialogic response from them.

To employ the opportunity to receive high quality information, the interview questions (see Table 13 in Appendix 7) have been designed in advance based on the evidence from the literature review and the scales implied by the quantitative questionnaire part, so it could provide a research certain boundary regarding each characteristic. Moreover, the interview questions are proposed to indicate the combination of characteristics that might infer the sequencing strategy – these combinations are indicated in the questions, for instance, ‘G~S’ which stands for the indication of questions with the combination set of global mindset(G) and sequencing strategy (S). During the interview, the questions are intentionally formulated to receive more evidence for the characteristic combinations.

Furthermore, in addition to the five characteristics to investigate the organisational characteristics, the outcome ‘Sequencing Strategy’ was included in the questionnaire. The outcome characteristic is specifically included only in the interview questions, and not as the scale in the quantitative questionnaire, because the purpose of the qualitative interview of the given research was to examine the background circumstances and stories of their internationalisation strategic decision. Both focused and unfocused sequencings are measured by the quantity of codes mentioned during the interviews, for instance, the quotations are coded in terms of the background and form of sequencing strategies they followed.

Having said this, as suggested by Matthews (2005) – that researchers should not ask questions to elicit answers to specific questions, but rather to make it possible for participants to talk about something in their own words – the interview questions have been outlined in semi-structured interview. By doing so, the interviews could offer the opportunity to the interviewees to share their own story, pass on their knowledge and provide their own perspective on a range of topics (Leavy & Hesse-Biber, 2006) that will be highly precious for the case descriptions in the following research step which is not simply to be inferred through the quantitative questionnaire result. Some of the sensitive topics, especially, when it comes to the questions in terms of financial resources, some interviewees denied to answer to the questions.

From the operational perspective, both quantitative questionnaire and qualitative interview questions were provided to the interviewees via Email before the real interview was hold and all open questions have been answered. Sometimes, the interviewees already provided the answer to the quantitative questionnaire ahead of holding the interview, but there were also some cases that they sent the result of the questionnaire after having the real interview. Most of the cases, the questionnaire was answered prior to the execution of the qualitative interview, to minimise the bias that might be created during the interview conversation.