Cross‐Border Knowledge Transfer in the Digital Age: The Final Curtain Call for Long‐Term International Assignments?

Jana Bucher, Benjamin Bader and Jürgen Deller

Journal of Management Studies, 2024, vol. 61, issue 5, 1792-1824

Abstract: Digital technology has altered how multinational companies (MNCs) transfer knowledge across borders. With digital communication media (DCM), knowledge exchange can become more cost‐effective, thereby reducing the need for face‐to‐face exchange. DCM's influence on long‐term international assignment management for cross‐border knowledge transfer remains unclear. Based on 71 interviews with German human resource (HR) managers and subsidiary HR counterparts, we investigated the use of DCM to exchange knowledge across country borders. Exploring these conditions alongside HR managers’ unique perspective on global mobility management prior to and during the global COVID‐19 pandemic, we present two major findings. First, 12 facilitating conditions are necessary for digital knowledge transfer across borders to be accepted as a valuable alternative to long‐term international assignments. Second, we identified individual connections between facilitating conditions and found that five conditions decreased in relevance, while the remaining seven became core aspects of successful digital knowledge transfer during COVID‐19 and possibly beyond.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12971

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jomstd:v:61:y:2024:i:5:p:1792-1824

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... s.asp?ref=00022-2380

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Management Studies is currently edited by Timothy Clark, Steven W. Floyd and Mike Wright

More articles in Journal of Management Studies from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().