문화지능과 문화적 거리가 우리나라 해외직접투자기업의 성과에 미치는 영향에 대한 실증연구

An Empirical Study on the Effects of Cultural Intelligence and Cultural Distance on the Performance of Korean FDI Firms

With Korean overseas direct investment increasing recently, FDI became one of the important factors for overseas investors to be successful in the global market. There are many factors influencing the performance of the Korean overseas direct investors such as the economic, institutional, political, cultural environment. It is rather easy to obtain information or data on economic, institutional and political elements, but difficult to get data about culture and to apply such in real business. For more than three decades, researchers tried to quantify cultural differences by country and analyze the effect of these differences on the performance of overseas investors. However, empirical results show no consistent conclusion due to various reasons such as improper quantification of cultural differences, the effect of organizational or regional culture, among others. In this study, we added a new cultural factor called “cultural intelligence of overseas investors”, which may offset the effect of cultural distance on performance. Using survey data from 264 Korean FDI firms in 28 countries, our empirical test shows that cultural intelligence and localization of management affect the performance of overseas investors but none of cultural distances composite index. So it is important to raise the cultural intelligence of overseas investors and localize management of companies in order to enhance the performance of overseas direct investment.