How the Nature of Ownership and Cultural Variables in International Joint Ventures Affect the Shaping of Business Strategies and Financial Performance

Abstract

The study analyzed a Korean case in which two commercial banks started

their operation with different composition of ownership.

The study has shown that the different nature of the ownership generated

different assumptions and values in the two banks, and these assumptions

and values in turn played vital roles in the shaping of different strategies

adopted in the two banks. The study has also shown that these different

strategies were responsible for the different levels of organizational commitment

of employees resulting in significant gaps in financial performance be -

tween the two banks.

The findings of the study should be used to caution researchers in organization

science against conducting exclusively behavioral-or perhaps even exclusively

strategic-empirical studies that focus on a narrow set of possible

explanatory variables. Thus, the study argued that progress in the field of

cross-cultural research could perhaps best be facilitated through more integrative

research approaches that cross traditional methodological and disciplinary

boundaries.