Relational determinants of attention the voice of a

Relational Determinants of Attention: The Voice
of a Subsidiary
Initiative taking. This dimension refers to the
conscious and deliberate actions of subsidiary
managers in their marketplace (Birkinshaw &
Hood, 1998; Birkinshaw et al., 1998). Initiative tak-
ing is similar to other forms of “taking charge”
behavior (Morrison & Milliken, 2003; Morrison &
Phelps, 1999) in that it is voluntary (not formally
required by headquarters) and change-oriented
(that is, aimed at improving a subsidiary’s status
and perceived significance in a corporate system).
Subsidiary initiatives are typically directed toward
new products or services, or new market opportu-
nities. And they usually represent an extension to
or departure from the subsidiary’s established man-
date. Evidence from a variety of sources highlights
the potential value of subsidiary initiatives for a
firm as a whole (Rugman & Verbeke, 2001), but
their outcomes are uncertain and to some degree
embedded in their local market contexts, so the
effectiveness of subsidiary initiatives as attention-
capturing tools is ambiguous (Schulz, 2001). In
fact, Birkinshaw (2000) argued that many MNEs are
intolerant of ideas and proposals that have not been
directly solicited from the top and that, as a result,
subsidiary managers are sometimes reluctant to
fully exert their entrepreneurial influence.
In this study, we argue that initiative taking can
generate flows of positive attention from parent
companies both directly and indirectly. The direct
effect is likely to be experienced during routine
visits to a subsidiary operation. Consider an exam-
ple from our research interviews: when the CEO of
ABB, a Swiss-Swedish engineering group, visited
582 June Academy of Management Journal

the managers of its Czech subsidiary, he discovered
that they had come up with the rather ingenious
idea of linking the company’s administrative com-
puters at night (when they were not used) to lever-
age their combined processing capacity. This meta-
network, which allowed the company to more
quickly run R&D algorithms with a particular math-
ematical structure, gave unprecedented recognition
and support to the Czech subsidiary. The indirect
effect takes two forms: either headquarters execu-
tives see the early-stage results of a subsidiary ini-
tiative in the form of increased revenues or higher
profitability, or the individuals behind the initia-
tive develop a reputation across the MNE for their
actions and subsequently come to the attention of
headquarters executives.
Hypothesis 2a. Initiative taking by a subsid-
iary’s managers is positively related to the pos-
itive attention that the subsidiary receives from
corporate headquarters.
Profile building. This dimension refers to the
broad set of efforts undertaken by subsidiary man-
agers to improve their image, credibility, and rep-
utation within their parent MNE. If initiative taking
is fundamentally about action taken in the local
subsidiary context, profile building is the comple-
mentary set of activities focused on the corporate
network. The logic stems from the argument that