Organizational Practice Adoption in The MNC: A Trait Activation Theory Approach

INTRODUCTION
A key concern in the MNC literature is the question regarding the effectiveness of organizational practice adoption by the different international subsidiaries (e.g., Canato, Ravasi, & Phillips, 2013; Kostova, 1999; Kostova & Roth, 2002; Yu & Zaheer, 2010). In MNCs, organizational practices are used to share knowledge, best practices, and operating policies across subsidiaries (Canato, Ravasi, & Phillips, 2013; Yu & Zaheer, 2010). However, organizational practice adoption is often hampered by different internal and external contingencies (e.g., Jensen & Szulanski, 2004; Kostova, 1999). Prior research identified a number of factors that can affect the adoption of practices across firms including the firm’s institutional and relational contexts (e.g., Kostova, 1999; Kostova & Roth, 2002) and within firms including characteristics of the knowledge (Szulanski, 1996a) and the practices that are being shared (e.g., Canato, Ravasi, & Phillips, 2013; Yu & Zaheer, 2010).
Our study is motivated by two observations: First, despite longstanding calls for research “to study individual-level variables, such as education, expertise, orientation to change, and even some personality variables” (Kostova & Roth, 2002: 230), there is little explicit knowledge about whether, when, and why some individuals are more willing than others are to adopt organizational practices.