Knowledge Acquisition of Local Managers: Its Antecedents and Effctiveness

Abstract

The objectives of this article are to examine how expatriates and local managers of the subsidiaries of Multinational Corporations’ (MNCs), or joint ventures, interact to affct local managers’ learning; and to investigate how local managers’ knowledge acquisition from expatriates affcts their own performance. To achieve those objectives, the research utilises both quantitative and qualitative exploratory approaches. Data were collected from surveys and indepth interviews at 109 international joint ventures in Vietnam, including dyadic data from 68 local manager-expatriate duos. Through the survey, this research confims the hypothesis that expatriation fosters tacit knowledge transfer. It also suggests that receivers have a stronger impact on knowledge acquisition than providers. In addition, we fid that among various types of knowledge being transferred in expatriate-local manager interactions, only ‘acquired tacit professional’ knowledge affcts local managers’ performance.