Unfolding and Developing Disseminative Capacity in Mncs

Despite its critical role in knowledge transfer and the development of multinational corporations (MNCs), disseminative capacity has received limited attention compared to the mirror concept of absorptive capacity. Drawing from the knowledge-based view, this paper suggests and conceptualizes four staged dimensions of disseminative capacity – identification, articulation, association, and continuous support. From the perspective of integration mechanisms in MNCs, we further distinguish different types of knowledge senders in MNCs (headquarters vs. subsidiaries) and explore how structural and social integration mechanisms could shape the disseminative capacities of headquarters and subsidiaries, respectively. Our conceptual model shows that these mechanisms might produce different results for headquarters’ and subsidiaries’ disseminative capacities. Our fine-grained approach recognizes asymmetries between units within MNCs and explains how integration mechanisms could create tradeoffs between the efficiency and effectiveness of cross-border knowledge transfer