Abstract
PurposeThis paper aims to contribute to the multinational company (MNC) literature by studying the diffusion of a management idea within an MNC and its interaction with the MNC’s corporate immune system (CIS).Design/methodology/approachThe qualitative single case study draws on evidence of how a management idea augments within an MNC and changes its development practice.FindingsThe study identifies four phases of the diffusion process and presents the interaction between the management idea and the CIS in each phase.Practical implicationsThe more subsidiaries within an MNC that take the initiative to adopt a management idea, the harder will it become for the headquarters (HQ) to reject it. Thus, to ensure that changes in management practices are based on informed and, ideally, deliberate decisions, managers should critically evaluate management ideas immediately at inception.Originality/valueThe study breaks new ground by explaining how the CIS reacts to the diffusion of management ideas in MNCs.
Highlights
One of the purported and well-researched advantages of a multinational company (MNC) over purely domestic firms is the ability to draw on geographically dispersed knowledge resources and leverage them globally (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989; Baskici, 2019; Kogut, 1991)
The aim of this paper was to increase our understanding of the reactions of the corporate immune system (CIS) to the diffusion of a management idea from an MNC’s global industry context that started as a subsidiary initiative
In addition to a description of how a management idea takes over an MNC network, we contribute to the subsidiary initiative literature that has hitherto largely neglected the adoption of management ideas, by arguing that subsidiary initiatives that comprise adopting fashionable management ideas circumvent the CIS since they avoid triggering the interpreted predispositions that underlie resistance (Birkinshaw and Ridderstråle, 1999), suspicion of the unknown and ethnocentrism
Summary
One of the purported and well-researched advantages of a multinational company (MNC) over purely domestic firms is the ability to draw on geographically dispersed knowledge resources and leverage them globally (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989; Baskici, 2019; Kogut, 1991). Studies in international business (IB) global strategy have examined the intraorganizational diffusion of management practices within the MNC (Hultén, 2006; Kostova, 1999; Kostova and Roth, 2002), the diffusion of human resource management practices (Ahlvik and Björkman, 2015; Ferner et al, 2012). The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
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