We also suggest that environmental turbulence will moderate
the relationship between export coordination and EMO
behavior. Specifically, we suggest that export coordination is
most needed under conditions of high environmental turbulence.
Under the latter conditions, export competitive offerings
proliferate, technological advances bring new opportunities and
threats in firms' export markets, and export customers have
more tightly defined requirements (Menon, Jaworski, & Kohli,
1997). In this situation, information relevant to the firm's export
market success can originate in numerous sources in the firm,
and good relationships with other business functions are critical
to ensure that this information is generated and disseminated to
the appropriate people within the firm (Diamantopoulos &
Cadogan, 1996). Likewise, effective export decision-making is likely to require export managers to be able to leverage
powerful functional groups within their organizations in order
to overcome inertia and stimulate continuous adaptation to the
rapid changes occurring in the export environment (see
Homburg, Workman, & Krohmer, 1999). When the export
environment is less turbulent, the information required to
manage the firm's marketing activities can be generated using
fewer sources, change is less apparent, and there are fewer
demands put on export decision-makers (Diamantopoulos &
Cadogan, 1996). Accordingly, there is less need for other
departments to become involved in EMO behaviors, or to
facilitate the export unit in its EMO activities. For this reason,
we test the following hypothesis: