Knowledge Transfer, Organisational Learning, and the Performance of International Strategic Alliances

: A Co-evolutionary Perspective

Abstract

This research aims to unpack the paradoxes in cross-border knowledge transfer and learning processes and their impacts on the performance of international strategic alliances. This research thus develops a co-evolutionary view on international strategic alliance performance and empirically investigates the interplay between contextual and processual antecedents of alliance performance. -- By large-scale and cross-sectional survey research on a sample of 671 Taiwanese information and communication technology manufacturers with international strategic alliance experience, this research finds that an alliance is likely to be considered as unsuccessful if there is large institutional distance between the countries from where the partner firms originate, because such difference could simultaneously fortify the transferor’s protectiveness behaviour towards knowledge transfer and the recipient’s ambiguous perception towards the transferred knowledge. This, in turn, weakens the recipient’s potential absorptive capacity and decreases the amount of knowledge acquired through international cooperation. Yet this research also discovers that relational capital accumulated by the partner firms along with cooperation could facilitate the cross-border knowledge transfer processes, as with a more harmonious relationship between the partners, the transferor’s protectiveness behaviour towards knowledge transfer would be unnecessary and thus be lessened, and the recipient’s ambiguous perception towards the transferred knowledge would be diminished as well. This could subsequently enhance the recipient’s potential absorptive capacity and the amount of knowledge acquired, leading to a greater notion of a successful international strategic alliance.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2012
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Pervez Ghauri (Supervisor) & Matt Vidal (Supervisor)