Transfer of managerial practices by French food retailers to operations in Poland

Executive Overview We studied French food retailing chains operations in Poland over a period of ten years to assess their ability to transfer their managerial practices and work routines to Polish store management and floor personnel. We discovered that the retailers experienced great difficulty in reproducing their model in Poland because knowledge transfer was impeded by the differences between the management model of the French retailers and the behavior model of their Polish recruits. Both models were embedded in quite dissimilar home country administrative heritages. The resulting blockage threatened the growth potential of French hypermarkets, which relied on the rapid training of large numbers of store management and staff. We show that the French retail managers went through three phases in attempting to transfer their practices. In the first phase, they endeavored to impose the home office practices without adapting to the different attitudes of the first Polish employees. In the second phase, they overcame the period of confrontation of the two models by adapting their practices and creating a shared common space for learning with their employees. By diverging from the home office methods, they succeeded in training their Polish employees to run the first hypermarkets. In the third phase, currently under way, the retailing home offices are re-imposing standardization of methods, to ensure globalization of their business model. We conclude that, despite the temporary divergence led by local managers in adapting to local conditions, multinationals will eventually re-centralize and impose home-office approved practices because the knowledge encompassed is considered fundamental to the firm's business model.