The relationship between internationalization and performance has attracted researchers’ attention for more than 40 years, producing contradictory results. Research on emerging-market (EM) multinationals’ performance has not added much clarity to the issue. Although contingency theory is widely applied in management research to explain superior organizational performance as a direct result of a ‘fit’ between structure, strategy, and environment, there has been little effort in extending the notion of strategy-structure-environment fit to include internationalization. We address this limitation by offering a comprehensive analysis of Russian internationalized firms’ performance, which reflects the complexity of strategic and structural changes that Russian firms make during internationalization. We use survey data on 213 predominantly private and mature firms to examine whether the alignment of a multitude of strategic and structural choices in a specific context matters for subsequent performance. We apply a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) and find several distinct types of ‘fit’ that positively affect Russian internationalized firms’ performance.

We offer a preliminary examination of whether national and organizational level contexts amplify or reduce the effects of de-globalization on the performance of MNCs. Theoretically, we borrow ideas from both event system theory and institutional fit to propose a model explicating key dimensions of the relationship between de-globalization, national and organizational context, and MNC performance. We then test our ideas using data assembled from 283 MNCs in 20 countries. We find that while de-globalization has a negative effect on MNC performance, national and organizational level contextual endowments do moderate this relationship. We discuss some implications of our findings and highlight attendant limitations.