The Influence of Foreign Partners’ Disseminative Capacities on Knowledge Transfers to International Joint Ventures

Abstract

This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on the influence of knowledge senders’ willingness to share knowledge, their disseminative capacities and the knowledge-transfer opportunities they create on the effectiveness of knowledge transfer. We develop a theoretical framework that examines the impacts of key knowledge-senders’ abilities and behaviors on the knowledge-transfer process. We test our theory using survey data collected from 199 South Korean IJVs. We find that the willingness of foreign parent firms to share knowledge is manifested in their efforts to increase their abilities to articulate and codify knowledge, and to apply those skills to the codification of knowledge relevant to their IJVs. A willingness to share knowledge also plays a role in increasing the opportunities for two-way interactions, especially face-to-face interactions between the parents and their IJVs. The impact of the abilities of foreign parent firms to articulate and codify knowledge for transfer is mediated by the efficacy of their organizational communication systems. We also find that the opportunities created for the transfer of explicit knowledge have a significant impact on such transfers. However, opportunities for transfer of tacit knowledge only have an impact when senders and receivers have similar products and technologies.