The Distinctiveness of Knowledge Sharing Processes within Multinational Companies

This paper builds on the relevance of knowledge assets in providing competitive advantage in dynamic economies. In order to outperform rivals in today’s high-velocity markets, firms need to put in place appropriate knowledge management strategies that are essential to speed learning processes. In this regard, KS is considered a key process through which employees can gain access to the organizational intellectual capital and contribute to the firm’s innovativeness and competitiveness. According to the literature, KS processes are particularly relevant in MNCs. By operating in more than one country, MNCs provide an effective organizational vehicle by which to transfer knowledge as they are seen as networks that create, access, and share knowledge across national boundaries. In this study we attempt to investigate how KS processes occur within multinational enterprises, by focusing on the antecedents of such processes. In particular, we explore the impact of both MNCs’ corporate culture—distinguished in four different typologies, that is, innovative, competitive, bureaucratic, and community culture—and the employees’ perceptions of top management support toward two dimensions of KS, that is, knowledge donating and knowledge collecting.