We conceptualize international assignees as informational boundary spanners between multinational enterprise units, and develop a cross-level model that explores how assignees' social capital ...translates into inter-unit intellectual capital. First, as knowledge brokers, assignees create inter-unit intellectual capital by linking their home- and host-unit social capital, thereby enabling cross-unit access to previously unconnected knowledge resources. Second, as knowledge transmitters, assignees' host-unit social capital facilitates their creation of individual intellectual capital, which, in turn, translates into inter-unit intellectual capital. We conclude that individual social capital needs to be explicitly transferred to the organizational level to have a sustained effect on inter-unit intellectual capital.
Global teams may help to integrate across locations, and yet, with formalized rules and procedures, responsiveness to those locations’ effectiveness, and the team members’ experiences of work as ...meaningful may suffer. We employ a mixed-methods approach to understand how the level and content of formalization can be managed to resolve these tensions in multinationals. In a sample of global teams from a large mining and resources organization operating across 44 countries, interviews, observations, and a quantitative 2-wave survey revealed a great deal of variability between teams in how formalization processes were enacted. Only those formalization processes that promoted knowledge sharing were instrumental in improving team effectiveness. Implementing rules and procedures in the set-up of the teams and projects, rather than during interactions, and utilizing protocols to help establish the global team as a source of identity increased this knowledge sharing. Finally, we found members’ personal need for structure moderated the effect of team formalization on how meaningful individuals found their work within the team. These findings have significant implications for theory and practice in multinational organizations.
Business Cycles across Space and Time FRANCIS, NEVILLE; OWYANG, MICHAEL T.; SOQUES, DANIEL
Journal of money, credit and banking,
June 2022, Volume:
54, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We study the comovement of international business cycles in a time‐series clustering model with regime switching. We extend the framework of Hamilton and Owyang (2012) to include time‐varying ...transition probabilities to determine what drives simultaneous business cycle turning points. We find four groups, or “clusters,” of countries that experience idiosyncratic recessions relative to the global cycle. In addition, we find the primary indicators of international recessions to be fluctuations in the term spread, equity markets, and geopolitical risk. In out‐of‐sample forecasting exercises, our model is an improvement over standard benchmark models for forecasting both aggregate output growth and country‐level recessions.
Ever since Frankel and Rose's (1998) seminal paper, the literature on trade and business cycle synchronization has relied on gross trade data, with weak results in recent papers that carefully ...address omitted variable bias. This paper re-examines this relationship using new value-added trade data for 63 advanced and emerging economies during 1995–2013. In a panel framework, we identify a significantly positive impact of bilateral (value-added) trade intensity on business cycle synchronization—controlling for global common shocks, country-pair heterogeneity and other covariates—that is absent when gross trade data are used. There is also some evidence that the impact of value-added trade on synchronization increases with the degree of (value-added) intra-industry trade. We provide a theoretical rationale for the role of value-added trade for synchronization using a simple international business cycle model that features cross-country input linkages in production.
•The impact of trade intensity on business cycle synchronization is re-examined.•Novelty of the approach lies in distinguishing between value-added and gross trade.•Robust significant positive impact is identified which is absent using gross trade.•This empirical finding is consistent with theory including our simple IRBC model.•This impact increases with the degree of intra-industry trade.
The Dark Side of Digital Globalization Verbeke, Alain; Hutzschenreuter, Thomas
Academy of Management perspectives,
11/2021, Volume:
35, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article describes the dark side of digital globalization primarily in terms of its impact on the multinational enterprise (MNE). Digital assets have brought about a new kind of firm-level ...internationalization. Those assets operate as firm-specific advantages (FSAs) throughout the firm's value-creating processes. The dark side refers to the new challenges and costs associated with such globalization, especially those related to overestimating the nonlocation-boundedness of FSAs and to underestimating the need to engage in novel resource recombination as a complement to the extant FSA reservoir. It demands the same attention we want to give to supposed opportunities and benefits. Our research question addresses how to achieve the desirable, balanced conceptual focus on the bright and dark sides of digital globalization, aligned with mainstream contingency thinking in international business research. We first describe the key components of the bright side, namely a higher digital intensity of the MNE's asset base and the related FSAs supporting digital globalization. We subsequently provide an overview of the main components of the dark side. We seek, via an integrative approach, to stimulate scholarly dialogue about the relevant trade-offs in international business strategy.
Born digitals Monaghan, Sinéad; Tippmann, Esther; Coviello, Nicole
Journal of international business studies,
02/2020, Volume:
51, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Johanson and Vahlne (J Int Bus Stud 40(9):1411–1431, 2009) articulate various theoretical mechanisms underpinning the internationalization process; mechanisms they suggest are pertinent across firm ...type. Their argument builds on their earlier publications and, in this spirit, we consider Johanson and Vahlne (2009) in the contemporary context of digital firms. In particular, we revisit their theorizing as it relates to firms that had only begun to emerge when Johanson and Vahlne published their award-winning paper: born digitals. We address how technological affordances, especially direct engagement with stakeholders, automation, network effects, flexibility and scalability, affect the internationalization of born digitals. We also develop a future agenda for international business research on born digital firms.
Work practices that involve employees are generally assumed to be less effective in more hierarchical societies where employees' values are not aligned with such practices. In this study, we ...challenge this assumption by developing a theory that differentiates between the symbolic and instrumental aspects of involvement work systems and proposing that their symbolic impact will be more pronounced in egalitarian societies, whereas their instrumental impact will be more pronounced in hierarchical societies. In particular, we draw on the symbolic action perspective and theories on culture to test the relationship between involvement work systems and operational effectiveness by incorporating organizational climate of participation and national cultural differences in power distance. Using multi-source, multilevel data from 260 facilities of a multinational company operating in 22 countries, we found that the mediated relationship between involvement work systems and operational effectiveness through climate of participation (i.e., the symbolic impact) was stronger among facilities located in lower power distance societies. On the other hand, the direct relationship between involvement work systems and operational effectiveness (i.e., the instrumental impact) was stronger in higher power distance societies. Overall, our study resolves a seeming cultural dilemma with regard to how involvement work systems operate cross-culturally.
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