Managing Expatriation, Repatriation and Organisational Learning in MNCs: an Integrative Framework

In the expanding global economy knowledge has became one of the most strategically-significant resource, so that firms’ competitive advantage depends, more and more, on their ability to create, transfer and protect knowledge asset. Since very few firms are able to develop a wide range of knowledge internally, expatriation and repatriation may be considered as important sources of competitive advantage, thanks to the huge amount of knowledge, both tacit and explicit, that corporate may acquire by managing the cycle. Prior researches mainly investigated the intra-organisational knowledge transfer – from headquarter to subsidiaries – allowed by the expatriates. Very few studies, on the contrary, focused on the “reverse” process – from the subsidiaries to headquarter. According to this, we aim at deeply investigate the conditions upon which intra-organisational knowledge transfer may occur, and corporate learning process may be fostered, as well. In doing so, we focus on the entire expatriate-repatriate cycle, assuming that the effectiveness of knowledge transfer depend on the way the whole process is managed. An integrative theoretical model will be finally suggested, and recommendations for further researches will be proposed.