Our research study was organized into two parts. In the first part, we conducted about 50 interviews with executives in corporate headquarters and subsidiaries of 30 global companies. The interviews were conducted in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. We asked headquarters executives about the systems they used for managing attention in their companies and how they allocated their attention among competing claims from subsidiaries. We also asked subsidiary company executives to discuss strategies they used for gaining the attention of executives at the parent companies. In the second part of the study, we developed a questionnaire to ask managers about the “weight” and the “voice” of the subsidiaries, and the amount of attention the subsidiaries actually received. We received completed questionnaires from 283 subsidiary managers in four countries (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States). We also collected secondary data on the same subsidiary companies: how often they were mentioned in the annual report of their parent company, and market share and sales volume in the local country.
Subsidiary Weight and Attention Our baseline hypothesis was that attention decisions would be based partially on the structural positions that subsidiary units occupy within the corporate system their “weight.” To test this hypothesis, we undertook a series of regression analyses, which showed that attention correlates with such factors... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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