Using interview data from managers in eight German and Japanese corporate HQs and their subsidiaries in Japan or Germany, we provide the first large-scale empirical analysis of the language barrier and its solutions. We found that language is an important barrier, slowing down and increasing the...

This research note draws the attention to the harmful consequence of a serious lack of empirical research in the field of International Human Resource Management: myth-building on the basis of one or two publications. The apparent myth of high expatriate failure rates is shortly discussed. To...

This study offers an empirical test and extension of the Bartlett and Ghoshal typology of multinational companies (MNCs) A three-fold typology of multinational companies: Global, Multidomestic and Transnational is developed from the literature. This typology is tested using data from 166...

Social interaction between managers from different units of a multinational enterprise (MNE) has been shown to be an important factor stimulating intra-MNE knowledge-sharing. Face-to-face social interactions form a communication channel particularly conducive to the transfer of tacit,...

This research note draws the attention to the harmful consequence of a serious lack of empirical research in the field of International Human Resource Management: myth-building on the basis of one or two publications. The apparent myth of high expatriate failure rates is shortly discussed. To...

This paper investigates publication patterns of Australian academics in Economics & Business. I show that this discipline follows the general Australian trend of declining impact, measured as citations per paper, from the mid-1990s. However, the gap in Australia's ranking of publication quantity...

This study systematically investigates how language barriers influence trust formation in multinational teams (MNTs). On the basis of 90 interviews with team members, team leaders and senior managers in 15 MNTs in 3 German automotive corporations, the authors show how MNT members’ cognitive...

Within the field of bibliometrics, there is sustained interest in how nations “compete” in terms of academic disciplines, and what determinants explain why countries may have a specific advantage in one discipline over another. However, this literature has not, to date, presented a...

We conceptualize international assignees as informational boundary spanners between multinational enterprise units, and develop a cross-level model that explores how assignees' social capital translates into inter-unit intellectual capital. First, as knowledge brokers, assignees create...