Research On Factors Influencing Knowledge Transfer Performance In Multinational Mergers And Acquisitions

In the era of global knowledge economy, the core knowledge has become thecompetitive advantage for enterprises. The corporations mastering the advancedtechnical knowledge and management experience will surely occupy a dominantposition, seize the strategic opportunity and win the broader market. Thus, how toacquire the needed and valuable knowledge has become a difficult question. Thereare two ways for enterprises to enhance the knowledge stock, internal innovation orexternal acquisition. Since self-innovation will not only spend more time, energy andtake long time, also may suffer the failure risk of research and development. Inaddition, the influential enterprises holding the core knowledge in the developedcountries, pay much attention to the confidentiality principle of core assets, resultingin the knowledge received from multinational cooperation which is quite commonand couldn’t play a key role. Therefore, more and more enterprises prefer to devotehuge investment and choose multinational mergers and acquisitions, so that they canmaster the actual control of the foreign company, and acquire the needed knowledgeresources through internal knowledge transfer.Knowledge transfer can be divided into three direction modes:parent-subsidiary transfer, subsidiary-parent transfer and subsidiary-subsidiarytransfer. Knowledge transferor and knowledge receiver are the research subjects inthis article, instead of the parent company and subsidiary company, which is aninnovation of the study.Based on the theory of knowledge transfer and knowledge transfer performanceof multinational merger and acquisition as the research subject, knowledgetransferor‘s characteristics, knowledge receiver’s characteristics and knowledgeattributes are selected as three influencing factors. Transfer willingness can representknowledge transferor’s characteristics. And knowledge receiver’s characteristicsinclude willingness to learn and absorptive capacity. Knowledge attributes includeimplicity and exclusivity. Based on these, then the article proposes hypotheses andbuilds a theory model. By using SPSS16.0and Lisrel8.70software, we do theempirical analyses on117vaild questionnaires, which contain descriptive statisticalanalysis, reliability analysis, validity analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Theultimate result from the model fitting test tells that all the hypotheses are wellconfirmed, and conclusions are drawn from these. The last chapter points out theresearch limitations and the future research directions. Through qualitative analysis and quantitative research, the essay comes to thefollowing conclusions:1. For the knowledge transferor, transfer willingness andknowledge transfer performance has a positive correlation;2. For the knowledgereceiver, willingness to learn and absorption capability both have positivecorrelations with knowledge transfer performance;3For knowledge attributes,implicity and exclusivity both have negative correlations with knowledge transferperformance.