Research Article
A Model for Choosing Between Inter-Affiliate and Intra-Affiliate Resource Sharing Based on Affiliates' Strategic Situations
Published: January 2009 · Vol. 38, No. 2 · pp. 483-521
Full Text
Abstract
This paper begins by recognizing the problems that can arise in the process of directly applying theories centered on U.S. firms to Korean diversified firms, which possess structural characteristics different from those of diversified U.S. firms. Existing studies have applied the same logic regardless of whether resource sharing occurs at the affiliate level or the business unit level within the organizational hierarchy; however, this paper argues that when considering the structural characteristics of Korean firms, resource sharing among affiliates and resource sharing among business units within an affiliate should be understood based on different logics. To this end, this paper proposes inter-affiliate relatedness, the affiliate's strategic mission, the affiliate's competitive strategy, and the attractiveness of the affiliate's resources as determinants of resource sharing, and establishes and empirically tests hypotheses regarding which factors affect resource sharing among affiliates and which factors affect resource sharing among business units within an affiliate. Through hypothesis testing, this paper obtained the following conclusions. First, higher degrees of industry relatedness and resource relatedness among affiliates were associated with greater resource sharing among affiliates. Second, when an affiliate's strategy was a differentiation strategy, there was greater resource sharing among affiliates, whereas when a cost leadership strategy was pursued, there was greater resource sharing among business units within the affiliate. Third, higher levels of resource endowment and greater value of possessed resources in an affiliate were associated with greater resource sharing among business units within the affiliate, while lower levels of resource endowment were associated with greater resource sharing among affiliates. This paper emphasized that the logic of resource sharing should differ according to the level of analysis. Existing studies on resource sharing have uniformly applied the same logic regardless of the level of analysis. However, this paper argued that the nature of resource sharing differs according to the level of analysis, and therefore differentiated logics should be applied. Accordingly, the significance of this paper lies in presenting an integrated analytical framework reflecting the characteristics of corporate headquarters–affiliates–business units and differentiated logics according to the level of analysis, and in particular, in empirically demonstrating how the determinants differentially affect resource sharing among affiliates versus resource sharing among business units within affiliates.
