Empirical Study on the Reverse Knowledge Transfer Process of Subsidiary's Marketing Knowledge

Early research on RKT (Reverse Knowledge Transfer: knowledge transfer from subsidiary to headquarter) in MNCs focused predominantly on key factors affecting RKT. Although knowledge transfer is a process in which an organization re-creates and maintains a complex, causally ambiguous set of routines in new settings, the prior studies on RKT have not put these factors into consideration. For this reason, this study saw RKT as a continuous process. In other words, it is a process where a subsidiary creates new knowledge in a local market and shares, transfers, and applies it with HQ. In such a process, this study aims to verify what kind of factors exist when a subsidiary creates marketing knowledge in the local market and to verify what kind of factors exist in a course of sharing, transferring, and using the knowledge in conjunction with HQ, based on the established references. We advance a series of hypothesis to achieve the research objective by using a sample of subsidiaries located in South Korea. By doing this, we reveal that marketing knowledge application by HQ depend significantly on the marketing knowledge creation of subsidiaries and knowledge integration mechanisms. In addition, knowledge relevance between HQ and the subsidiary, and absorptive capacity of HQ used to moderate the positive relationship between knowledge integration mechanisms and marketing knowledge applications of HQ are examined