A Meta-analysis of Factors Leading to Management Control in International Joint Ventures

In international joint ventures (IJVs), management control exerted by parent firms is fundamental since it can direct employees' activities to strive for the overall goals, to safeguard parent firms' idiosyncratic investments and to decrease opportunistic behaviors. Using a meta-analytic approach, we investigate the main factors influencing management control in IJVs. A search of the published and unpublished literature uncovered 45 articles that yielded 329 reported correlations between the factors and management control with a total sample size of 15,252 IJVs. Results indicate that the factors can be ordered in the following way in terms of the average size of their association with management control: resource contribution; equity share; trust; and strategic importance to the IJVs. Three moderators including operating country (China versus other countries), industry type (manufacturing versus service) and management control type (formal control versus informal control) were proposed to examine the heterogeneity issue. Our meta-analysis suggests that there is a bias of the empirical studies given that a majority of the samples are IJVs operating in the Chinese manufacturing industry, which indicates that results of this meta-analysis may not be representative of all IJVs and that future empirical research should include IJVs in other countries and in other industries.