The influence of empowering leadership on repatriate knowledge transfer: Understanding mechanisms and boundary conditions

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Authors

Repatriate knowledge represents a valuable organizational resource, but its transfer upon return to the domestic work unit is a difficult process that often fails. To date, the leaders’ role in repatriate knowledge transfer (RKT) has not been studied empirically. This study employs the social information processing theory to understand the effect of empowering leadership on RKT. Based on multi-source data from 101 repatriate and domestic coworker dyads, we found that empowering leadership facilitated RKT via the perceived trustworthiness of domestic coworkers. Furthermore, the positive influence of empowering leaders on RKT was stronger when repatriate agreeableness was high. With our findings, we advance research on the role of leaders in cross-border knowledge transfer processes via repatriates in multinational companies.

Original languageEnglish
JournalThe International Journal of Human Resource Management
Volume33
Issue number7
Pages (from-to)1437-1462
Number of pages26
ISSN0958-5192
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17.03.2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by the State of Lower Saxony, Germany through doctoral scholarship funds that are aimed at promoting scientific female talent.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

    Research areas

  • Management studies
  • Business psychology - empowerring leadership, international assignment, repatriate agreeableness, repatriate knowledge transfer, social information processing theory