Small and mid-sized companies looking to sell across borders face a daunting set of hurdles. They must win the trust of foreign buyers who prefer established suppliers, meet unfamiliar technical standards, and coordinate deliveries across time zones and cultures, all while working with tight budgets. In business-to-business (B2B) markets, where relationships often matter more than transactions, the person at the top and the team beneath them can make or break the effort.
A new study in the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing looks at how CEO behavior, digital tools, and team capabilities combine to help small industrial firms grow internationally. The research finds that visionary leadership, digital investment, and sharp team thinking work together to power cross-border growth, but a CEO’s narcissistic streak can quietly derail the whole effort.
The question behind the research
Luu Tien Dung of the University of Economics and Law at Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, working with colleagues at Lac Hong University, set out to understand what enables small B2B firms in emerging economies to turn leadership ambition into real international activity. Prior research had shown that CEOs matter and that digital tools matter, but few studies had traced the actual chain connecting a leader’s vision to a firm’s on-the-ground success with foreign industrial buyers.
The team focused on three ingredients. The first was strategic leadership: a CEO’s ability to articulate a vision, allocate resources, and help the organization adapt. The second was the degree of digitalization, meaning how deeply digital technologies like analytics, cloud platforms, and customer-relationship systems are woven into the firm’s operations. The third was team-level capability, split into two parts: shared managerial thinking (how well the top team collectively interprets foreign markets and reallocates resources) and team entrepreneurial alertness (how sharply the team spots and evaluates new opportunities abroad).
Layered on top of these was the wild card of CEO narcissism, defined by grandiosity, overconfidence, and a hunger for admiration. The researchers wanted to know whether narcissistic tendencies would help or hinder the pathway from leadership to international growth.
How the study was conducted
The team surveyed 496 middle managers working at 248 Vietnamese small and mid-sized firms engaged in international B2B activity. These were manufacturers, industrial suppliers, and logistics providers exporting to foreign businesses rather than consumers. Middle managers were chosen because they typically handle the day-to-day realities of export documentation, foreign buyer negotiations, and product adaptation, and can observe both their CEO’s behavior and the firm’s operational performance.
Managers rated their firms on standardized scales measuring strategic leadership, digital adoption, team cognition, team alertness, and international entrepreneurial activity, meaning things like introducing new products for foreign markets, taking calculated risks abroad, and proactively pursuing overseas opportunities. To reduce the temptation of self-enhancement, CEO narcissism was rated anonymously by the middle managers rather than by CEOs themselves.
The researchers then used a combination of statistical techniques, including structural equation modeling and configurational analysis, to test how these ingredients interacted.
What the analysis revealed
CEO strategic leadership had a strong positive link to international entrepreneurial activity. A substantial portion of that effect flowed through digital investment: leaders who prioritized digital tools helped their firms engage foreign buyers, manage relationships across distance, and coordinate cross-border operations. Digital technology, in other words, was not just infrastructure but a channel through which leadership vision reached foreign markets.
Team cognition and team alertness also served as important channels. When top teams shared a common way of interpreting foreign buyer requirements and could flexibly redeploy resources, leadership vision translated into concrete cross-border action. When teams actively scanned for signals, connected disparate pieces of information, and evaluated potential opportunities, they helped their firms recognize openings that others missed.
Then came the finding on narcissism. When CEO narcissism was low, the team-based pathways operated at full strength. When narcissism was high, those pathways weakened sharply. The indirect effect running through team alertness essentially vanished among firms with highly narcissistic CEOs. The effect running through team cognition was cut to a fraction of its strength.
The researchers interpret this as evidence that narcissistic tendencies disrupt the collaborative sensemaking that industrial markets demand. When a CEO dominates conversations, dismisses feedback, and centralizes decisions, teams lose the room they need to interpret foreign signals collectively and to spot opportunities that require open discussion and diverse perspectives.
Multiple paths to the same destination
The team also ran a configurational analysis, which looks for different combinations of conditions that produce the same outcome. This yielded ten distinct pathways to high international entrepreneurial activity. Some relied heavily on digital tools combined with alert teams; others leaned on strong team cognition even when digital adoption was less advanced.
Notably, CEO narcissism appeared in some successful configurations and was absent in others. The authors interpret this as showing that while narcissism tends to weaken the average firm’s team-based pathways, some firms manage to succeed anyway when other conditions compensate. Narcissism, they argue, is not a universal poison, but it is also not a prerequisite for bold international moves. In many successful configurations, it was simply irrelevant or absent.
What this means for business leaders
For managers running small industrial firms with international ambitions, the study points to several practical takeaways. Digital investment appears most valuable when it directly supports relationship-building with foreign buyers, such as shared order-tracking systems, collaborative design platforms, or customer-relationship management tools that help maintain continuous engagement across time zones. Treating digitalization as a standalone technology upgrade misses much of its value.
The findings also suggest that firms benefit from institutionalizing team-based routines rather than relying on individual insight. Weekly customer-feedback reviews, cross-functional export planning meetings, and post-negotiation debriefs help teams build the shared mental models that let them respond quickly to changing technical standards or regulatory shifts.
For firms with a strong-willed CEO, the researchers recommend governance mechanisms that counterbalance concentrated authority: advisory boards, structured feedback from key customers, and practices like inviting dissenting views or rotating meeting facilitation. These are not just cultural niceties but ways to keep the team-level machinery working.
Caveats worth noting
The study was conducted in Vietnam, an emerging economy with specific institutional conditions, and the sample was drawn using convenience-based methods rather than a full random sample. The findings may not translate directly to firms operating in radically different regulatory or cultural settings, or to much larger multinationals where decision-making is more distributed.
The data are also cross-sectional, meaning they capture a single snapshot rather than tracking firms over time. The authors call for longitudinal research that could trace how leadership, digital adoption, and team dynamics evolve before, during, and after major international moves. And because all measures came from surveys of middle managers, some caution is warranted in reading the results as strict cause and effect, though the researchers took steps to minimize self-report bias, including asking managers rather than CEOs to rate narcissism.
