What Impact Does the Organisational Structure of a Multinational Corporation Have on the Transfer of Knowledge Between Its Subsidiaries?

Introduction

As globalization changes the world faster and faster, Multinational Corporation is becoming one of the essential parts of the world. In this colourful world, Multinational Corporation plays an important role in both developing countries and developed countries. Obviously, most of multinational corporations are Western European, American and Japanese; they use foreign low-cost labours and low-cost transportation to decrease cost in order to get profit. Furthermore, with enough quantity of labours, multinational corporations would produce their products efficiently and effectively. Besides, with multinational corporations’ characters, they can transfer their knowledge among subsidiaries. Indeed, knowledge transfer is quite useful for multinational corporations; they can realise culture, style, and the way of thinking from each others, then, they could creates diversified products to gain more customers in order to get more profits. Clearly, multinational corporations can provide developing countries with critical financial infrastructure for economic and social development. Because multinational corporations are not only create lots of jobs in their subsidiaries, but also improve technology and train people with specific knowledge. In this way, subsidiaries seem to be happy with knowledge transfer. Speak to knowledge transfer, it seems that knowledge transfer is important for both headquarters and subsidiaries. Actually, transferring knowledge from headquarters to subsidiaries is quite simple and helpful, and it is happened in every kind of multinational corporations. However, the difficult part is the knowledge transfer between multinational corporations’ subsidiaries. Indeed, there always be some impacts on knowledge transfer between subsidiaries, and different organisational structure of a multinational corporation has different impacts on the transfer of knowledge between its subsidiaries.

Body

In fact, there are many different kinds of...