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As multinational companies enter different countries, the extent of cultural unfamiliarity they face depends on their most recent entry. We examine this pattern of added cultural distance between a newly entered target country and the closest previous one and its effect on ownership decisions in each cross-border acquisition (CBA). We also examine the combined effect of added cultural distance and time between successive acquisitions on such decisions.

The sample came from the Thomson Financial Securities Data Corporation (SDC) Platinum database, which spans different source and target countries for a 25-year period (1980–2014). We collected firm- (acquirer and target), industry-, country-, and transaction-level variables from SDC. After merging information from the different sources, the final sample comprised 10,423 CBA observations from 138 target countries.

Our findings reveal that the ownership share decision is affected negatively by added cultural distance but positively by the time between two successive acquisitions. In addition, prior ownership and geographic distance moderate the relationship between added cultural distance and ownership in CBAs.

Our findings suggest that MNCs' managers who consider CBAs need to carefully examine closest previous target information and CBA experience, rather than focusing on direct cultural distance between the focal firm and target firm. Additionally, they should also consider the relevance of key contingency factors.

We disentangle the effects of added cultural distance on CBA ownership decisions and explore the boundary conditions of this relationship.

In organizations today, protecting information and computer assets from attacks or disaster has become one of the top managerial issues. The purpose of this paper is to propose and empirically test a comprehensive model of computer security behaviors of individuals in the workplace.

The model was developed based on the reference disciplines of the theory of reasoned action, moral obligation, protection motivation theory (PMT), and organizational context factors. The measurements for the variables in the model, including computer security behavioral intention were adapted from prior studies, and their reliability and validity were verified by a confirmatory factor analysis. The model was empirically analyzed by structural equation modeling with respect to data from 162 employees in a number of organizations in Korea.

The results indicate that moral obligation and organizational norms along with attitude toward computer security behavior have significant impacts on employees’ behavioral intentions of computer security. In addition, perceived threat severity, response efficacy, and self-efficacy, which are drawn from the PMT, have significant impacts on employee attitude, whereas security policy has significant impacts on the organizational norms.

The paper provides a useful model for analyzing employees’ computer security behaviors in the workplace. Also, the paper reveals that moral obligation as well as attitude toward computer security behavior was a significant predictor of an individual employee's intention to practice computer security behavior.