Subsidiary Roles, Perception Gaps and Conflict – A Social Psychological Approach

Michael Kutschker is one of the scholars in management who suggested already a long time ago that we should study firms in general and multinational corporations (MNCs) in particular from a network perspective (Kutschker 1980, Kutschker/Schmid 1995).1 Nowadays it is quite common in the international business (IB) literature to view multinational corporations (MNCs) as networks. While many contributions focus on inter-organizational and local networks (e.g., Powell/Koput/Smith-Doerr 1996, McEvily/Zaheer 1999, Andersson/Forsgren/Holm 2002), this paper concentrates on intra-organizational networks (Hedlund 1986, Prahalad/Doz 1987, Bartlett/Ghoshal 1991, Schmid/Schurig/Kutschker 2002). One important assumption of MNC network models is that subsidiaries can take highly differentiated roles and can fulfil different functions for the entire MNC or for parts of the MNC (Bartlett/Ghoshal 1986, p. 88, Ghoshal/Nohria 1989, p. 323, Birkinshaw/Hood 1998a, p. 6, Paterson/Brock 2002, p. 142). The notion of differentiated subsidiary roles has inspired a considerable amount of conceptual work as well as empirical research (e.g. White/Poynter 1984, Young/Hood/Dunlop 1988, Jarillo/Martinez 1990, Gupta/Govindarajan 1994; for an overview see Schmid/Baurle/Kutschker 1998, Schmid/Kutschker 2003).