경영자간 관계적 특성이 중국 진출 한국기업 지식습득과 성과에 미치는 영향: 신뢰와 비공식 네트워크의 역할을 중심으로

Drawing upon the organization learning theory and social capital perspective, this study aims to examine the influences of subsidiary top management’s relational characteristics (i.e., parent-subsidiary managerial trust and communication, subsidiary-local firm managerial trust and business networking, subsidiary-local government officials’ political networking) on subsidiary knowledge acquisition and performance in a transition economy. Furthermore, we classify local experiential knowledge into business knowledge and institutional knowledge, and investigate the moderating effects of the two types of local experiential knowledge and parent knowledge on performance respectively. Using survey data from 131 Korean firms in China, we demonstrate that both parentsubsidiary managerial trust and communication help subsidiary’s knowledge acquisition from the headquarter. In addition, subsidiary and local firm’s managerial trust is positively associated with local business knowledge acquisition, while informal business networking does not have a significant effect on business knowledge acquisition. The results also reveal that political networking with local government officials increases the amount of local institutional knowledge the subsidiary acquires. This implies that the local government still controls significant portions of strategic resources and fine-grained information, causing the tendency of managers to maintain a ‘disproportionately greater contact’ with government officials. Besides, our analysis discovers the positive effect of parent company’s knowledge and local business knowledge on subsidiary performance. This finding suggests that it is necessary to acquire local business knowledge for successful internationalization. We also find that the positive relationship between the parent company’s knowledge and subsidiary performance is moderated by local institutional knowledge, whereas moderating effect of parent company’s knowledge and local business knowledge is negatively related to subsidiary performance. These findings imply that parent company’s knowledge and institutional knowledge are complementary while balancing parent company’s knowledge and business knowledge is very difficult.