THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE CHARACTERISTICS AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CROSS-BORDER KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER - A CASE IN JAPANESE FIRMS
This research is aimed at studying the effectiveness of cross-border knowledge transfer from Japanese companies to their business affiliates in Northern Malaysia by looking into knowledge characteristics and the mediating effect of the business affiliates’ learning intent. By focusing on attributes identified by existing literature, there were 4 aspects being investigated to study how they influence the effectiveness of cross-border knowledge transfer, namely embeddedness, articulateness, acquired explicit know-how, and acquired tacit know-how, as well as how the business affiliates’ learning intent mediates the relationship between these aspects and the effectiveness of cross-border knowledge transfer. After forming hypothesis, questionnaire for this study was developed by adopting elements from existing literature and was then submitted for pre-test to reduce ambiguity and other potential issues. Data was collected and analysed after receiving returned questionnaires that were sent to Japanese’s business affiliates in Northern Malaysia through mail post. The results indicate that knowledge characteristics such as the embeddedness, articulateness, acquired explicit and tacit know-how are positively related to the effectiveness of cross-border knowledge transfer, and that the business affiliates’ learning intent significantly mediates the relationship between knowledge characteristics and the effectiveness of cross-border knowledge transfer. The result of this study could provide business practitioners a deeper insight about improving knowledge transfer by focusing on the attributes that would make the transfer of knowledge more easily and effective, in which could help to reduce costs, and to save time and resources. Last but not least, this study also contributes to the literature of knowledge transfer for its findings on the mediating effect of learning intent.