ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURAL CROSSVERGENCE AND INNOVATION: EVIDENCE FROM JAPANESE MULTINATIONALS IN EMERGING MARKETS

Abstract

This study investigates the potential of organizational cultural crossvergence for local market innovation. For surviving in heterogeneous local context, multinational corporation subsidiaries are required to realize innovation for local market. From the cross-cultural point of view, there exist three options: Convergence on parent company’s culture, divergence from it, and crossvergence which refers to the mixture of it and local society’s culture. We hypothesized that organizational cultural crossvergence would perform best among them, since it can enable subsidiaries to take advantage of both cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity. We examined it using the sample of 162 Japanese subsidiaries in emerging markets that gave a suitable ground for examining cultural power.

Keywords

• Emerging markets
• Japanese multinational corporation
• Local market innovation
• Organizational cultural crossvergence
• Subsidiary management