Headquarters’ Attention and Its Effect on Subsidiary Performance

By Tina C. Ambos, Julian Birkinshaw. 2010

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Drawing on a sample of 283 subsidiaries in three countries, we investigate how headquarters’ attention affects subsidiary performance.Scholars have recently argued that top management’s attention is the most critical, scarce and sought-after resource in organizations (Haas and Hansen 2001; Bouquet and Birkinshaw 2008). However, the question how headquarters’ attention affects subsidiary companies remains largely unexplored.Our study shows that subsidiaries which have a high level of strategic choice and receive attention from headquarters perform better than their peers. More specifically, we find that the interactions of subsidiaries’ autonomy, inter-unit power and initiatives with attention increase subsidiary performance.

Subfields: Accounting

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/50765d5d8bd62448285eea89dcfdc99f7c6743ba