A greater amount of research attention has been devoted towards the emergingmarket multinational corporations (EMNCs) that integrate resources internationallyin comparison to the developed MNCs who hold a headquarter-centric perspectiveof knowledge transfer (Liu & Meyer, 2020). EMNCs are said to hold similar featuresas that of MNCs when it comes to acquiring technological knowledge and manage-rial expertise from subsidiaries (Child & Rodriguez, 2005), which eventually helpsthem gain a competitive position among global companies (Luo & Tung, 2007).EMNCs, especially Chinese MNCs, require their overseas subsidiaries to become in-dependent units and survive using their own capabilities in order to provide them ahigh level of autonomy to carry out different value activities. Such autonomy allowsthe subsidiaries to tap into local knowledge (Andersson et al., 2002), which thus,enhances their product innovation and knowledge development (Persaud, 2005;Phene & Almeida, 2008). Consequently, instead of being recipients, subsidiaries ofEMNCs have transformed their roles to become knowledge creators and have cometo reverse transfer knowledge back to their headquarters (HQs), improving theirHQs’overall performance (Liu & Meyer, 2020).However, subsidiaries playing the role of agents may not voluntarily engage inreverse knowledge transfer (RKT) in accordance to their HQs’interests, such as inte-gration of knowledge from the principal-agency perspective of the EMNCs (Kongaet al., 2018). As excludable knowledge is crucial for having success in globally com-petitive markets, all independent subsidiaries protect their competitive advantageand prevent themselves from being involved in the process of RKT (Gupta & Govin-darajan, 2000). Although RKT characterized by intensive information exchange ishighly beneficial to HQs, it may prove to be a time-consuming process for thesubsidiaries holding complex knowledge and the interpretation of specific contexts(Andersson et al., 2002). As more and more autonomous subsidiaries are speculatedof having lesser hierarchical cooperation with their HQs (Noorderhaven & Harzing,