The Interplay Between Emotions and Legitimacy in Managing the Global-Local Tension

Abstract

Expatriates reside under the paradoxical tension between global integration and local adaptation, when the assignment is to implement a global strategy in a local context. This tension triggers complex emotions that expatriates need to regulate in order to perform. Although the link between the individual-level emotion and the firm-level strategy implementation is of utmost importance in a multinational corporate context, it remains under-researched to date. We therefore investigated what kind of emotions evoke under such tension and how the emotion results in organisation-level outcome. We collected a 612-day ethnographic data related to new product launch projects in a multinational corporation and triangulated the findings with internal archival information and formal interviews. As a result, we found that the global-local tension evoked mixed emotions among expatriates over time, and those emotions influenced the individual’s legitimacy in two phases: legitimacy seeking stage and legitimacy owning stage. These phases reiterated, and the repetitive cycle over time developed an emotional dynamic at organisation-level across the project team. We argue that expatriates’ actions and behaviours to regulate mixed emotions evoked by the global-local tension influence the way the individual’s legitimacy develops, as they change the interaction and the relationship among the actors. In turn, the individual-level legitimacy influences the organisation-level emotional dynamic and thus the performance.