This study examines how management control systems employed in a foreign subsidiary affect performance. Under a modern global competitive environment, foreign subsidiaries are required to attain both company-wide efficiency and local response or flexibility. Many studies on international business have indicated an importance of such strategic roles of foreign subsidiaries in their local markets. From a standpoint of management control, it is important that headquarters permits the subsidiary to arrange its management control systems for flexible local adaptation, while headquarters forces it to follow standardized rules and procedures for global efficiency. Although management control exerted by foreign subsidiaries is likely to directly affect their performance, few studies focus on how subsidiaries benefit from their own management control systems. We employ a construct of enabling control (Adler & Borys, 1996) in order to measure management control systems pursuing efficiency and flexibility under a hierarchical relationship between a foreign subsidiary and headquarters. We develop hypotheses that enabling control within a foreign subsidiary is positively related to its performance and several factors affect the formation of enabling control. Data collected from a survey of 579 managers of multinational companies are used to test our hypotheses. First, our sample has split into five groups, on the basis of the relative difference in scores between four design principles (i.e., repair, internal transparency, global transparency, and flexibility) composed enabling control. As a result of a clearer classification, the group where enabling control is well formed included only 46 subsidiaries out of 579 samples. A multiple comparison test among the five groups supports the effectiveness of enabling control. In a secondary analysis, we explore whether the formation of enabling control is affected by four factors: the degree of competition that a foreign subsidiary faces, innovativeness of the local market that the subsidiary operates in, subsidiary size, and headquarters managers’ environment relevant information. A multinomial logistic regression analysis indicates that market environment relevant information, size, and innovativeness are significantly and positively associated with the formation of enabling control. Overall, this paper contributes to the growing literature on foreign subsidiary management and enabling control. Relying on a cross-sectional analysis, this study extends this literature by providing evidence on the formation and effectiveness of enabling control in foreign subsidiaries.