2023 Volume 20 Pages 135-148
In an age when foreign direct investment by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has become commonplace, how can SMEs transfer their organizational culture to their overseas subsidiaries, given a lack of global human resources and funds to secure and train them? Results of interviews with the surveyed companies were analysed using SCAT in order to find out not just about their human resources but also their unique organizational management as SMEs. It was found that instead of head office imposition on overseas subsidiaries, there was a mix of knowledge transfer to and initiative in the overseas subsidiaries as equal partners, generating a sense of unity. These superior characteristics of organizational culture transfer—flexibility, mobility, and agility—are difficult to achieve at the scale of a big corporation. An organizational structure in which overseas subsidiaries are regarded as a division of the head office in Japan facilitated the transfer of organizational culture. In addition, long-serving local employees of the overseas subsidiaries played a role as brokers of communities of practice in the transfer of organizational culture, maintaining and sustaining the organizational culture of overseas subsidiaries.
