Abstract:Existing international business research only distinguishes the exploring and exploiting motives of internationalization, and points out that organizational slack is important for firm's internationalization, but ignores to discover how organizational slack impacts exploring and exploiting internationalization.Except that, organizational research on the relationship between slack resources and exploration or exploitation also obtains contradictory conclusions.Based on the resource rarity and absorption, this paper divides organizational slack into four types and examines how these four slacks influence exploring and exploiting internationalization.We find financial slack is positively related to exploring internationalization and negatively related to exploiting internationalization, meanwhile, relationship, operational and human resources slack are negatively related to exploring internationalization and positively related to exploiting internationalization.This study bridges the gap in international business and organizational research, and helps firm internationalize.