The present paper brings novel insights to career literature, in particular to the field of top managers' careers: first, by relying on the boundaryless career approach, we investigate how those managers who reach the top differ in terms of career variety before being appointed to the board. Second, by combining the boundaryless career approach with human capital theory, we analyze the association between top managers' career variety and the time it takes them to reach a board level position. For our empirical study, we use a sample of top managers from German DAX‐30 firms. Our results reveal four distinct clusters of top managers, indicating that, before reaching the management board, no uniform career path exists. We also demonstrate that more career variety does not shorten an individual's way up to upper echelons; rather, it extends the time it takes to ascend to the top.

The number of top managers with foreign nationality and of top managers with international work experience on corporate boards has increased over the last decades. In business and management literature, the common understanding is that board diversity and international work experience for board members go hand in hand with numerous positive consequences for MNCs. But how does dissimilarity in nationality and in international work experience affect a top manager and his or her tenure on the board? Drawing on interpersonal attraction research and analyzing 149 management board members from German DAX-30 firms, we find empirical evidence that dissimilarity in nationality and in international work experience have a negative association with tenure. Based on social capital theory, we also suggest that the nexus between a top manager with an international background and his or her tenure is moderated by ‘firm insidership’. Our data confirm that having work experience in a firm before being appointed to its board is indeed linked to longer tenure but does not alleviate the disadvantages of being international. In sum, the resulting implication of our research is that, contrary to widely accepted scholarly opinions, a top manager’s international background may also have detrimental effects—in our case negative effects on tenure.

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