Cultural bridging and the performance of international joint ventures
研究了文化桥接（即合资伙伴母国文化与东道国文化更相似从而弥补母国与东道国文化差距）对国际合资企业绩效的正面影响，并发现它增强了母国-东道国文化距离的正面效应、减弱了母国-伙伴国文化距离的负面效应。
The existing predictions and findings regarding the effect of cultural distance on the performance of international joint ventures (IJVs) remain inconsistent. We suggest that this inconsistency is due to the lack of conceptually differentiating the cultural distance between the firm’s home country and its partner(s)’country (home-partner country cultural distance) from the cultural distance between the firm’s home country and the location of the IJV (home-host cultural distance). We contribute to our understanding of IJVs by explicitly differentiating these two types of cultural distance, and by introducing the concept of cultural bridging. Cultural bridging relates to the proportion of home-host cultural distance that is compensated by having a joint venture partner, whose home country culture is more similar to the host country culture than the MNE’s home country culture is to the host country culture. We theorize how cultural bridging affects IJV performance and how it interacts with home-partner country cultural distance and home-host cultural distance to influence IJV performance. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 1708 IJVs. We find that cultural bridging has a positive influence on IJV performance, strengthens the positive performance effect of home-host cultural distance, and reduces the negative performance effect of home-partner country cultural distance. Our findings help make sense of some of the inconsistent findings regarding the role that cultural distance plays for IJV performance.