1. ¹IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain
2. ²Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
3. ³Department of Management & Organizations, Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa, USA

Correspondence: BS Reiche, IESE Business School, Ave. Pearson, 21, Barcelona 08034, Spain. Tel: +34 93 602 4491; Fax: +34 93 253 4343; E-mail: sreiche@iese.edu

Received 23 November 2006; Revised 5 February 2008; Accepted 15 February 2008; Published online 13 November 2008.

Abstract

We conceptualize international assignees as informational boundary spanners between multinational enterprise units, and develop a cross-level model that explores how assignees' social capital translates into inter-unit intellectual capital. First, as knowledge brokers, assignees create inter-unit intellectual capital by linking their home- and host-unit social capital, thereby enabling cross-unit access to previously unconnected knowledge resources. Second, as knowledge transmitters, assignees' host-unit social capital facilitates their creation of individual intellectual capital, which, in turn, translates into inter-unit intellectual capital. We conclude that individual social capital needs to be explicitly transferred to the organizational level to have a sustained effect on inter-unit intellectual capital.