Accelerating acculturation through tacit knowledge flows: refining a grounded theory model

Purpose – Intercultural knowledge flows are critical to global enterprise performance, but the impact of knowledge management theory on such intercultural flows remains limited. This paper seeks to address this issue.Design/methodology/approach – The present investigation builds on and partially validates two prior studies: research to integrate institutional theory with knowledge flow theory, which provides a powerful theoretical framework for understanding how tacit knowledge flows across cultures; and recent qualitative research, which has employed this framework to develop a theoretical model of acculturation. The present investigation refines this model by drawing in particular from the mergers and acquisitions literature to characterize both accelerators and decelerators of acculturation.Findings – The paper is able to identify theoretical dimensions to measure acculturative stress, a concept that proves to be useful in terms of validating, refining and simplifying the basic acculturation model.Rese...