The impact of commitment, empowerment, embeddedness on knowledge management in domestic and foreign-affiliated firms in Japan

This paper analyses how employees’ organizational commitment and empowerment, and firms’ embeddedness influence the knowledge management (KM) activities of foreign‐affiliated subsidiaries of multinational corporations in comparison to domestic companies in Japan using regression analysis on data gathered from a questionnaire survey. Managers at Japanese‐owned firms exhibited significantly higher levels of commitment, while those at foreign‐affiliated firms reported greater levels of public knowledge storage and exploratory knowledge application. Although empowerment and supplier embeddedness were found to influence knowledge acquisition in both groups, customer embeddedness affected knowledge acquisition and commitment and empowerment affected knowledge diffusion for managers at foreign‐affiliated firms only. These discriminations between predictors of KM based on the country of firm ownership suggest that the culture of the parent company can affect local employees and managers, and thus shape the resulting involvement in knowledge creation activities.