Practice Transfer in Organizations: The Role of Governance Mode for Internal and External Fit

Abstract

This study leverages multinational corporations (MNCs) as a research context to advance our understanding of the relationship between internal and external fit over the course of the transfer of organizational practices. While internal fit describes the important condition that a practice should be aligned with organizational goals and must gain support internally, external fit refers to an additional condition for successful transfer, namely, that a particular practice must gain and sustain support and legitimacy in the environment. Studying two German MNCs transferring apprenticeship-based training to foreign operations in the United States, this paper starts from the key observation that organizations can use different governance modes to organize the transfer process: they may either go it alone and organize transfer in a hierarchy mode, or they may partner up with other organizations and form an interorganizational network for transfer. Using rich qualitative data, this paper finds that different gov...