Preparing the Survey

35 than 500 emails at once. The second reason is that if possible respondents from different companies are put in the receiver segment all together, that might cause the receiver to perceive the email as a spam and that causes a zero response rate.

In order to prevent this problem, the emails had to sorted differently according to a criterion. Sorting the email addresses according to the companies was the most logical way to differentiate them. Another method that was used to enable a high rate of response was to arrange the time of sending the emails. The emails that were sent out during the working days were preferably sent in the mornings or after lunch break. The aim of this action was to increase the chance of receiver to see the email and in parallel to that the survey link attached in the email before any other email messages were sent and blocks the one that has the survey. The same method was used for the weekend with the same logic and the emails were sent out Sunday evenings where the receiver can see the email on Monday morning. By thinking of these small touches, it was aimed to keep the response rate as maximum as it can be, in an environment where it is difficult receive full responses from the people whom the survey is sent to.

36 The survey starts with some informative questions and than the main questions comes after. The beginning questions were prepared to get brief information about the respondents. The questions are about the job title/position of the respondent in the company he/she is currently working at, the industry segment that the respondent is currently working, size of the organization that the respondent is currently working at, the estimated revenue of the company that the respondent is currently working at and finally the email address of the respondent if he/she is interested in the results of the research so that the results can be provided. The revenue and size questions are the control variables for the analysis part. The informative questions are followed by the main questions.

The data was collected from the respondents by implementing a 7 scale answering option. The expectation was to link the respondent’s answers to the company he/she works and in a way measure the company’s performance. Scales start with the lowest answer and end with the highest one and changes according to the group of question. There are three different answering options as it is given below.

• 1= very dissatisfied, 7= very satisfied

• 1= very unpredictable, 7= very predictable

• 1= strongly disagree, 7= strongly agree

The questions are formed under three different main question groups in order to test the hypothesis. These three main question groups are related with networking behavior, environment uncertainty and performance. The question groups were prepared in the aim of getting the most accurate result for the research. In this sense, with the first group of question, it was aimed to test the degree and type of networking of the firms. The second question group was formed to test if the networking behavior is helping to reduce the uncertainty in the environment where the company is operating. With the third and last question group, it was aimed to test if the performance of the company is increasing after

37 the reduction of the uncertainty in the environment. Under these, there are the main questions groups and there are sub question groups related with different specific areas. The hierarchy of main and sub questions are given in figure 4. All of the survey questions can be seen in appendix 1.

Networking Behavior

Environmental Uncertainty

Internationalization Performance

Proactivity FDI related environment

Internationalization Performance Commitment Macroeconomic

environment Strategy Material and infrastructure

environment Tie strength Consumption environment Loyalty Competitive

environment

Figure 4: Question group hierarchy, (Srivastava, Moser, &

Hartmann, 2018)

In order to measure the degree and type of networking, which is the moderator in the analysis, five different groups of questions are given to the respondents. These groups are proactivity, commitment, strategy, tie strength and loyalty. Proactivity is to measure how active is the respondent in terms of finding a network link to support the company’s business activities. Commitment is to measure how often the respondent is maintaining his/her networking linkages.

Strategy is to measure what type of strategy is the respondent generating in order to have networking connections. After learning the strategy, tie strength is to

38 measure the characteristic of the networking between the respondent and his/her network connection. At last loyalty is to measure the how is the respondent willing to keep his/her networking connection. To sum up, the questions of proactivity, commitment and loyalty measure the quantity of the networking behavior and the questions of strategy and tie strength measure the quantity of the networking behavior.

For the group of environmental uncertainty questions, which is the independent variable in the analysis, the sub question groups are about FDI related environment, macroeconomic environment, material and infrastructure, consumption environment and competitive environment. For these question groups, it is expected from the respondent to indicate how predictable the given factors are in the environment of the country that his/her recent international project took place. For the FDI related environment, the conditions such as the local laws, regulations, tariffs and thereat of armed conflict is asked to rate how predictable they are from the respondent. The predictability of the macroeconomic environment is measured through the conditions such as tax policies, monetary policies, inflation and exchange rate… The predictability of material and infrastructure environment is measured through the conditions such as quality and availability of inputs, transportation within the country and to foreign countries etc. For the consumption and competitive environment, common conditions are given to be rate in terms of predictability. Only for the consumption environment there are some additional conditions such as customer preference, product demand, availability of substitute product and complimentary products.

Besides these, the common given conditions between consumption and competitive environment are changes in competitor’s prices, changes in markets served by competitors, changes in competitor’s strategies, entry of new firms into market, domestic and foreign competitors. Lastly, the internationalization performance, which is the dependent variable in the analysis, is measured through the satisfaction degree of the respondents. It was only measured with the question of how satisfied is the respondent with the recent internationalization performance of his/her company comparing with the closest competitors.

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