KNOWLEDGE SHARING FROM “EAST TO WEST” THROUGH EXPATRIATES A social capital perspective

Abstract

The role of expatriates in MNCs has been regarded as strategic significant on knowledge transfer process; moreover the expatriation process is conducive to establish fruitful personal relationship as to enhance the development of social capital. Due to lack of sufficient study on knowledge transfer from “East to West”, the study of “East” expatriates seems to be significant to examine their social capital development that is helpful to understanding if knowledge flow from “East to West”.

The purpose of this study aims to examine the factors that have impact on expatriates’ social capital development at interpersonal level in order to understand whether knowledge is possible to flow from “East to West”, which facilitate knowledge transfer from Chinese expatriates. Since such sharing of ideas and personal beliefs would be affected with lots of factor, the study is delimited to explore different dimensions of social capital theory as well as examine best practices transfers with dominance effect theory in order to dig out the whether dominance mentality play significant role in sharing knowledge.

This study adopted case studies; furthermore the findings are based on 6 in-depth interviews that provide the empirical basis for case analysis. Finally it was found that tacit knowledge from Chinese expatriate hardly transfers to local Finnish subsidiaries, and explores that Chinese expatriates do hold certain knowledge, however because certain strict working process and large distinction technical background, these make tacit knowledge flows hardly to Finnish firm. It is also approved that dominance effect has a strong influence on the view of what is best practices and useful knowledge, even though Chinese expatriates have high willingness to transfer certain practices to local Finnish colleagues.