Knowledge-flows and firm performance

This study advances the understanding of how knowledge-flows impact on firm performance. Incorporating recent research on the knowledge-based view of the firm, this paper tests and extends the knowledge flow model by using more fine-grained measures and by proposing a nonlinear effect. This study tests the predicted effects in a longitudinal research design with data on a global sample of public biopharmaceutical firms. The results largely support the expectation that knowledge-flows largely have a nonlinear impact on firm performance. However, one traditional measure of knowledge-flows, geographical location, turns out to have no significant influence in the extended model. The paper explains the implications of these findings for practice and research.     

金融监管改革与金融稳定:美国金融危机的反思

由次贷问题引发的全球金融危机凸显了美国金融监管缺失的风险和加强金融改革的重要性。在几十年的发展中,美国金融监管体系逐步演进为双层多头的分业监管模式,促进了美国金融市场的繁荣。但是危机的爆发表明这种监管体系缺乏统一监管者,无法有效防范系统性危机,因而存在监管缺陷和监管效率相对低下的问题。危机后,美国政府开始意识到有效金融监管的重要性,并着力进行实质性的改革,以减轻美国金融监管体系与其金融市场制度、金融业务模式等的背离程度。新的监管体系方案有利于提高监管的有效性和促进金融稳定,但并不能根除金融危机根源,并且可能萌生新的金融风险。     

Affective conflict and identification of knowledge sources in MNE teams

How does affective conflict influence identification of knowledge sources in MNE teams? We apply social exchange theory and consider the effect of two types of affective interpersonal conflict: relational tension and self-interest on identification of knowledge sources in MNE teams. We further analyse how these effects are related to geographic and nationality differences. We test our hypotheses with a field study of 1181 dyadic interactions between 160 members within 40 MNE teams engaged in product innovation, human resources, and operational improvement in three large diversified MNEs. We find that affective conflict has a direct negative relationship to identification of knowledge sources in MNE teams. This relationship is further negatively moderated by geographic differences and nationality differences. Our study contributes to theoretical and empirical micro-foundations of conflict and identification of knowledge sources in MNE teams.     

Where does ESG pay? The role of national culture in moderating the relationship between ESG performance and financial performance

This study investigates the moderating role of a country’s culture as an external contingency factor in the relationship between a firm’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and financial performance. Using ESG performance data of 4978 firms from 48 countries for 17 years, we argue that the financial return from engaging in ESG varies depending on the countries’ cultural aspects because stakeholder evaluations and appreciations for a firm’s ESG performance differ across nations. We find that a country that espouses a culture of high individualism or masculinity tends to appreciate and reflect on this more explicitly, strengthening the relationship between a firm’s ESG performance and financial performance. Contrastingly, in a country with a culture of high power distance or uncertainty avoidance, firms’ ESG efforts are less likely to be associated with financial performance. Our findings have important implications for multinational enterprises facing various cultural environments when dealing with heterogeneous stakeholder demands across countries.     

多国企业理论研究述评

文章针对国际生产领域近年来的变化和国内吸引外资实践的需要,回顾了多国企业理论与对外直接投资思想在主题、深层思想、理论焦点上的演进和理论发展阶段的转折,论述了主流理论的解释力、局限性和目前理论的发展状况,最后提出多国企业理论的基本问题和未来的研究日程。     

The mediating role of alliances in the international market orientation-performance relationship of smes

Enhancing international performance is a critical issue for internationalizing SMEs. Researchers have suggested that firms need to enhance their international market orientation (IMO) in order to increase performance; but the way this association works is rather unexplored. This is important for both theory and practice since its exploration would lead to a better understanding on how SMEs can effectively enhance their international performance. In this paper, we examine whether alliances through which firms access knowledge and resources play a mediating role in the IMO and performance relationship. We investigate our hypothesis on a sample of 94 companies based in the United Arab Emirates. We discovered that alliances mediate the IMO-performance relationship and we extend the knowledge- and resource-based views of the firm.     

Expatriates as influencers in global work arrangements: Their impact on foreign-subsidiary employees’ ESOP participation

Employee stock-ownership plans (ESOPs) offered by multinational enterprises (MNEs) present an attractive investment for employees. Puzzlingly, participation rates are often low, raising the question what drives ESOP participation on a global scale. Grounded in the knowledge-based view of expatriate research, we build on the notion of expatriates as implicit knowledge transferors within MNEs. We hypothesize a positive effect of expatriate ESOP participation on subsidiary-employee ESOP participation, which is even higher when a subsidiary-employee’s distance toward the program and the firm is greater. Empirical results confirm our hypotheses suggesting that expatriates can be a mechanism to bridge the distance within MNEs.     

Transfer mechanisms and knowledge transfer: The cooperative competency perspective

This study examines the role of transfer mechanisms, including replication and adaptation, in knowledge transfer from the cooperative competency perspective. This study tests the hypotheses in a sample of 120 knowledge transfer cases. The results indicate that transfer mechanisms relate positively to cooperative competency with partnering firms, which then improves knowledge transfer performance. The results provide evidence that cooperative competency plays a mediating role between transfer mechanisms and knowledge transfer performance. The findings of this study contribute to the theoretical development of a conceptual model for explaining the interrelationships among transfer mechanisms, cooperative competency, and knowledge transfer performance. The empirical evidence of the Sobel test in line with Baron and Kenny's procedure and bootstrap analysis supports the process-oriented view and indicates that cooperative competency mediates the effects of transfer mechanisms on knowledge transfer performance. Finally, this study discusses the managerial implications and highlights future research directions.     

Policy takers or policy makers? The lobbying of global banking regulators

Do financial sector groups act as passive policy takers, or do they ‘shape’ the policies to which they are subject? This article responds to this question with three arguments pertaining to the policy shaping power of the financial industry when it comes to international financial standards. First, industry groups confront a number of additional challenges when it comes to lobbying international regulatory bodies, which tend to be more opaque in their decision making and more difficult to hold accountable when they make unpopular decisions. Second, while these groups are sometimes able to shape financial regulatory policy, the extent of this influence is more partial and contingent than most depictions suggest. The third argument advanced is that since the global financial crisis, business groups have had many of their traditional lobbying tools adversely affected, making lobbying a more uphill battle than before. Financial industry groups are able to influence the governance of their own activities and act as ‘policy shapers’ some of the time, but are less strongly positioned in this role than many existing depictions seem to suggest.     

Facilitating knowledge transfer during SOX-mandated audit partner rotation

Audit teams are responsible for the discovery of the true financial state of a business. The ramifications of the quality of these efforts ripple throughout our economy. Requirements of Section 203 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX)—which mandates rotation of the audit team member who bears primary responsibility for the audit—began to take effect as recently as 2007-2008. The potential for knowledge loss within the audit team via this mandated rotation comes with great costs and risks for all stakeholders, as audit team members possess perhaps the most intimate knowledge of businesses. To aid in the prevention of knowledge loss and the facilitation of knowledge transfer from the outgoing to the incoming partner, we suggest four primary knowledge transfer approaches which may be used together in the post-SOX environment. These approaches are: (1) adequate planning of member rotation far in advance of the deadline for each partner; (2) consideration of strategic fit among the incoming partner, the client, the industry, and the team; (3) improved documentation of the outgoing partner's knowledge to be shared with the incoming partner; and (4) increased interaction among the rotating partners—outgoing and incoming—and the client to assist in the sharing of critical, yet difficult to transfer, tacit knowledge.     

Trust and the tendency towards multi-unit franchising: A relational governance view

Previous research mainly focused on the agency-theoretical explanation of multi-unit franchising (MUF). The aim of this study is to develop a relational governance perspective of MUF by investigating the role of knowledge-based trust and general trust in franchisor's choice between multi-unit and single-unit franchising. Our data from the German franchise sector indicate that knowledge-based trust positively influences and general trust negatively influences the franchisor's tendency towards multi-unit franchising.     

团队权力分布的概念、效用机制与未来方向

团队权力分布的效用机制是团队权力领域的研究热点之一,但相关研究结果却并不一致。部分研究认为团队权力分布对团队绩效有促进作用,而另一些研究则发现其会抑制团队绩效。通过梳理团队权力分布文献,明确了团队权力分布概念,即团队权力分布是指团队中有价值资源的分布情况。在分析团队权力分布主要测量方式的基础上,基于等级制度理论,从功能主义及功能障碍主义两种典型的研究视角,分析当前研究结果不一致的原因：一是研究者所持的理论基础存在差异,二是团队权力分布效用受到团队权力相关因素、团队任务因素及团队领导特征因素等边界条件的影响。最后指出了未来可从团队权力分布概念、研究方法多元化、研究设计整体化和引入更多情境因素等方面进行深入研究。     

Financial Advice Giving and Taking—Where are the Market’s Self-healing Powers and a Functioning Legal Framework When We Need Them?

German banks tend to emphasize how satisfied their clients are with the financial advice they offer. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that this satisfaction may have little to do with the quality of the information exchange between clients and advisors but rather with substitute factors like the friendliness and appearance of the advisor. Applying the theoretical perspectives of New Institutionalism and Behavioural Finance we explain in this article why the coexistence of information and interest asymmetry between retail clients and advisors must lead to poor advice quality and why the market’s self-healing powers and the actual regulatory framework fail in preventing that. We support our theoretical analysis with some empirical evidence from a recent study we conducted to test the factual quality of the advice German banks give in the retail banking area. The results obtained are very consistent with previous findings of a poor level of quality of the information exchange between client and advisor and predominantly confirm our theoretical conclusions. We finally offer some suggestions that might pave the way out of this dilemma.

Franchising and firm financial performance among U.S. restaurants

Franchising has attracted the attention of retailing and entrepreneurship scholars in the past three decades, but evidence pertaining to how franchising affects financial performance is mixed and inconclusive. Thus, the question remains as to whether franchising firms exhibit better financial performance than non-franchising firms in the same industry. In order to find an answer to this question, our study compares the risk-adjusted financial performance of franchising versus non-franchising restaurant firms over the 1995–2008 interval, using five different performance measures: the Sharpe Ratio, the Treynor Ratio, the Jensen Index, the Sortino Ratio, and the Upside Potential Ratio. For each measure, the results revealed that franchising restaurant firms outperformed their non-franchising counterparts. Thus, we provide very robust evidence that franchising is superior on average in the restaurant industry, which can help explain the increasing popularity of franchising as a business form.     

Not all international assignments are created equal: HQ-subsidiary knowledge transfer patterns across types of assignments and types of knowledge

Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews in a case study of a Belgian multinational and its foreign subsidiary in Poland, we develop new insights into how using different types of international assignments (long-term expatriation, short-term expatriation, short-term inpatriation) allows a HQ-subsidiary dyad to transfer different types of knowledge (declarative, procedural, axiomatic, relational), both from and to HQ, during and after the assignment. We show how each type of assignment acts as a unique knowledge transfer channel, and why it is critical that HQ-subsidiary dyads use an appropriate combination and sequence of international assignments reflecting their specific knowledge transfer needs.     

Can formalization, complexity, and centralization influence knowledge performance?

Based on the theory of organizational design and on the theory of knowledge, this paper analyzes how the traditional variables which define a firm's organizational structure (formalization, complexity, and centralization) influence knowledge performance (the degree to which a firm generates knowledge internally and uses it to reach a competitive advantage). The paper tests three hypotheses using a sample of 164 large Spanish firms. The results show that organizational complexity and centralization exert a positive and a negative influence, respectively, on knowledge performance, which confirms the two hypotheses related to these variables. However, the analysis reveals no empirical evidence to confirm the hypothesis according to which formalization and knowledge performance have a positive relationship.     

Knowledge embeddedness and the transfer mechanisms in multinational corporations

This paper reports a qualitative study conducted at four Japanese subsidiaries in China and Vietnam about their process of international knowledge transfer. Building on the literatures concerning the diverse types and characteristics of knowledge in multinational corporations (MNCs), we explore the broad mechanisms adopted and locally generated by the host country subsidiaries for transferring the foreign knowledge and putting the locally embedded knowledge into practical use at the local settings. The findings indicated (1) the limitations of applying a standardized and universal set of knowledge transfer mechanisms without considering local idiosyncrasies and (2) the contributions of local agents and institutions throughout the process of local knowledge adaptation and development.     

金融知识对互联网金融参与重要吗

互联网金融发展至今,机遇与挑战并存,收益与风险同在,金融知识作为影响个体金融行为和金融决策的重要因素,是否会影响人们的互联网金融参与?哪类人更容易参与互联网金融市场?互联网金融参与的结果是盆满钵满还是竹篮打水?在互联网金融快速发展的背景下,对这些问题的回答至关重要。本文运用2017年中国家庭金融调查数据,实证检验了金融知识对互联网金融参与的影响。结果表明,金融知识对互联网金融参与有显著的促进作用。分组来看,在中青年、男性、中产阶级群体中,金融知识的影响更大;对于接受过高等教育或从事金融行业的群体,金融知识显著促进互联网金融参与。进一步研究发现,金融知识显著提高互联网理财参与深度,但对投资收益没有显著影响。因此,要降低互联网金融风险,促进互联网金融健康发展,需要更加关注市场微观主体,普及金融知识教育,推动投资者理性决策。