This study examines the interactive effects of host-country societal trust and formal institutions on foreign subsidiary staffing strategies. Based on the conceptualization of institutions in new institutional economics, we demonstrate that high societal trust and strong formal institutions that support market-based exchange jointly reduce the incidence of expatriate staffing in foreign subsidiaries. We identify two contingency factors – subsidiary interdependence and host-country experience – that affect this relationship. Our finding suggests that the level of interdependence among subsidiaries within the MNE network and the host-country experience of the subsidiaries negatively moderate the interactive effect of formal and informal institutions on expatriate staffing. We test our hypotheses based on longitudinal data of 6675 foreign subsidiaries of 435 Korean MNEs in 42 countries between 1990 and 2014.

本研究考察了东道国社会信任和正规机构对外国子公司人员配置战略的交互影响。基于新制度经济学中制度的概念化，我们证明了高度的社会信任和支持市场化交换的强大的正式制度共同降低了外国子公司的外派人员的发生率。我们确定了影响这种关系的两个偶然因素——子公司的相互依赖和东道国的经验。我们的研究结果表明，跨国企业网络内子公司之间的相互依赖程度和子公司的东道国经验对正式和非正式机构对外派人员配置的交互作用产生负面影响。