Knowledge acquisition of local amnagers: Its antecedents and effectiveness. The objectives of this article are to examine how expatriates and local managers of the subsidiaries of Multinational Corporations’(MNCs), or joint ventures, interact to affect local managers’ learning; and to investigate how local managers’ knowledge acquisition from expatriates affects their own performance. | Journal of Economics and Development, , , December 2016, pp. 64-86 ISSN 1859 0020 Knowledge Acquisition of Local Managers: Its Antecedents and Effectiveness Dao Thi Thanh Lam Business School, National Economics University, Vietnam Email: lamdao14@ Nguyen Anh Loi University of Minnesota, USA Email: loixx002@ Abstract The objectives of this article are to examine how expatriates and local managers of the subsidiaries of Multinational Corporations’ (MNCs), or joint ventures, interact to affect local managers’ learning; and to investigate how local managers’ knowledge acquisition from expatriates affects their own performance. To achieve those objectives, the research utilises both quantitative and qualitative exploratory approaches. Data were collected from surveys and indepth interviews at 109 international joint ventures in Vietnam, including dyadic data from 68 local manager-expatriate duos. Through the survey, this research confirms the hypothesis that expatriation fosters tacit knowledge transfer. It also suggests that receivers have a stronger impact on knowledge acquisition than providers. In addition, we find that among various types of knowledge being transferred in expatriate-local manager interactions, only ‘acquired tacit professional’ knowledge affects local managers’ performance. Keywords: Expatriates; local managers; knowledge acquisition; Vietnam; cross-culture management; knowledge transfer. Journal of Economics and Development 64 Vol. 18, , December 2016 1. Introduction per is two-fold. First, drawing on Szulanski’s theory of knowledge transfer, the study extends its application to an individual level analysis rarely seen in the management literature and responding to calls for a micro-foundation approach to understanding knowledge transfer among individuals within multinational corporations (Haas and Cummings, 2015). Second, although research emphasizes that expatriates play a role in tacit knowledge transfer .
