Issue Selling and Bargaining Power in Intrafirm Competition: The Differentiating Impact of the Subsidiary Management Composition

Abstract

This paper reports the findings from five case studies on Danish-owned subsidiaries in China and India and demonstrates how a subsidiary's issue-selling strategy influences its bargaining power in intrafirm competition within a multinational corporation. Issue-selling strategies of subsidiaries involve various activities aiming at (a) making the parent company understand an issue, (b) attracting parent-company attention to an issue, and (c) lobbying for an issue at the parent company. Next to illustrating these activities, the empirical part of the paper shows that subsidiaries managed by parent-company nationals have more bargaining power than subsidiaries managed by host-country nationals. To begin with, parent-company national subsidiary managers are better at translating the context-specific information deriving from cultural distances between the parent company and the subsidiary. Second, they are better at packaging the issue in order to match parent-company formalised application requirements. Further, they are better at framing the issue to match the parent-company goals and objectives. And last, they often have closer relationships with decision makers within the parent company.