This study employed upper echelon perspective, social capital perspective, and strategic leadership and leadership style perspectives to examine the effects of CEO transformational leadership and CEO dominance on the three internal social capital dimensions, i.e. structural, relationship, and cognitive capital, of top management team (TMT). It also investigated the effects of the TMT internal social capitals on firm performance, and the mediating roles of the TMT social capital in the CEO leadership-performance relationship. The unit of analysis is at the firm level. Structural equation modeling conducted with LISREL was employed to test the fitness of overall hypothesized model and the significance of hypothesized relationships among studied variables. Empirical results showed that the theoretical models fit the data very well, and most of hypotheses are supported; the significance of top executives and interactions on firm outcomes were significantly ascertained. Specifically, CEO dominance may produce negative effects on TMT network density and trust while CEO transformational leadership may promote TMT network density, trust, and shared vision. On the other hand, TMT network density may foster firm performance. Finally, results showed that TMT network density mediated the relationships of CEO leadership and firm performance. This study has significant implications for upper echelons perspective, the integration of strategic leadership and leadership style research, and the applications of social capital perspective. Research findings also exhibit valuable insights for the strategic implications of TMT dynamics in business practices. Limitations and future directions were discussed for further extensions.

The objective of this study is to investigate the determinants of the export behavior of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Turkey. In SMEs, key decision makers play important roles / therefore, studying the impact of managerial characteristics is of paramount importance for understanding the determinants of SME export behavior. Particularly, possible relations between CEO age, tenure, level of education, international experience and foreign language skills and the export performance of SMEs will be examined. While doing this, two distinct theories, namely, upper echelons perspective and resource-based view of the firm (RBV) will be integrated. Furthermore, the study will focus on the role of the human capital as a strategic resource that may enhance the SME export performance. The relations between international experience and foreign language skills of the human capital and SME export performance will be analyzed from upper echelons perspective and RBV point of view. Overall, this study attempts to illustrate that CEOs and human resources are valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable resources for SMEs, and that studying their attributes in SME internationalization context is crucial to understanding the determinants of expert activities of SMEs. As a result, this study expects to reveal important implications for those who aim at increasing the export performance of SMEs. Practitioners may benefit from the findings by addressing which managerial and human capital characteristics influence SME export behavior and in which directions, so that they can better match the characteristics of CEOs and human capital with SMEs in order to attain higher export performance.