On National Culture Influence Upon Knowledge Transfer Within Multinational Corporations

With the emergence of knowledge-based economy, knowledge transfer, knowledge gathering and knowledge innovation have been widely emphasized as competitive advantage sources for the success of multinational corporations (MNCs). While as a multi-cultural organization, the accumulated knowledge of MNCs is generated from specific political, economic and cultural backgrounds, in which cross-border knowledge transfer is inevitably subject to the impact of macro-cultural factors. Therefore, the study on the cultural factors affecting knowledge transfer within MNCs is extremely important.In the previous academic researches on this topic, they focus on various factors affecting knowledge transfer within MNCs and ignore the impact of national culture differences on knowledge transfer. Cultural difference is a significant barrier in international business activities for the employees from different culture backgrounds with diverse values, ethics and behaviors. In such circumstance, culture conflicts will occur, which ultimately influence the knowledge transfer effort; thereby there is a demand to examine the cultural impact mechanism. This paper aims to look at the issue of national culture’s role in knowledge transfer within MNCs by applying Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions. With the internship experience of the writer when living in France, first-hand data is collected by close contact with French company. Through the case study of Chinese and French MNCs, KNAUF Industries and the TCL Group, this paper makes a review on the application of Hofstede’s theory and explores implications for future research. The research work of the present paper consists of the following aspects:based on the literature and pilot studies, a theoretical framework is proposed to present national culture differences influence upon knowledge transfer from the perspective of Hofstede’s national culture dimensions. Next, along with the comparison of cultural differences between China and France by digging out the cultural roots, this paper elaborates in detail the impact of national culture differences on motivation and capacity of the sender and the receiver, knowledge characteristics and transmission channels in each cultural dimension. The follow-up two cases are further investigated to reinforce the theoretical analysis so as to examine the application of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory in practice.Based on the research, this paper finds that, on the one hand, the national cultural characteristics of the knowledge sender and receiver do have an impact on their motivation, capacity and choice of knowledge type and transmission channels; on the other hand, as the process of globalization accelerating and the trend of culture convergence, the national cultural characteristics have changed quietly. There is no doubt that such change will affect the effect of cross-border knowledge transfer. Few researchers are aware of this point before. Thus this paper suggests that Hofstede’s cultural dimension theory needs to be keeping with the times especially when applying in global business workplace. Hopefully, this research intends to promote the research on cross-border knowledge transfer and enhance the competitive advantage of Chinese and French multinational corporations, as well as serve as a helpful brief reference for those Chinese enterprises with ambitions to expand their business globally.