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1. Introduction
Beta Corporation has subsidiaries in 30 different countries, spread over five continents, with its corporate headquarters located in Sweden. The French subsidiary of Beta Corporation has 960 employees; it accounts for 19 per cent of the total sales revenue and 15 per cent of the total manufacturing output for the whole organization. In contrast, the Malaysian subsidiary of Beta Corporation solely deals with sales and has no manufacturing capacity. It has only 33 employees and accounts for less than 1 per cent of the total sales revenue of the whole organization. This example highlights the profound differences that there can be between two units located within the same organization, and it is interesting to speculate about whether both these subsidiaries have the opportunity to get their messages across to the headquarters. In particular, could the Malaysian subsidiary managers get the headquarters’ attention and a favourable response if they want to share novel business ideas that could be beneficial for the whole organization? The Malaysian subsidiary has a lower weight in the organization compared to the French unit, due to its smaller size, greater headquarter-subsidiary distance and lower strategic importance in the organization.
Weight is defined as being similar to subsidiary power; it is dependent on the position of the subsidiaries in the organizational network and/or strategic importance of the local markets in which the subsidiaries are present (Bouquet and Birkinshaw, 2008a). A subsidiary’s weight is also dependent on several other factors, such as subsidiary size (in terms of number of employees or sales revenue), access to critical resources and headquarter-subsidiary distance (where the distance can be cultural, geographic or linguistic). The headquarters has a hierarchically superior position in multinational corporations, while subsidiaries can use their weight to reduce the power asymmetry between them and headquarters. This means that the subsidiaries can exercise their power, based on, for instance, presence in strategically important markets, to gain headquarters’ attention and to influence decision-making (Dörrenbächer and Gammelgaard, 2016).
In addition to weight, Bouquet and Birkinshaw (2008a) argue that subsidiaries in multinational corporations can get their headquarters’ attention through voice, where voice is described as a combination of profile building and initiative-taking. Profile building and initiative-taking have common roots in impression management literature, and the two have...