A passage to India: cultural distance issues in IJVs’ knowledge management

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cultural distance has been identified as one of the main issues affecting partnership processes in international joint-ventures (IJVs). However, there is still a lot of debate about the role played by cultural differences in influencing IJVs’ knowledge management. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how cultural distance impacts on knowledge management processes of IJVs’ relationships in a cross-cultural business environment. We performed a content analysis focused on an embedded case study, the IJVs of the Generali Group in India. Results show that trust alone is not sufficient to support knowledge management within IJVs, as partners may feel reluctant to share strategic information. However, the creation of facilitation roles, the development of knowledge acquisition skills, and the contributions of managers and employees generate a social glue that increases the willingness to share knowledge and facilitates knowledge management processes.