توسعه مشارکت شرکت های فرعی به شرکتهای چندملیتی _کارآفرینی شرکت های فرعی و خلاقیت راهبردی

Despite its theoretical and managerial significance, subsidiary entrepreneurship and its effects on subsidiary contribution remain underexplored in the literature. We propose that subsidiary entrepreneurship encourages more creative strategic responses to escalating environmental change. We explore the direct and mediating effects of subsidiary entrepreneurship on subsidiary contribution to the MNC, particularly subsidiary strategy creativity. We use structural equation modelling to test our propositions on data generated from surveying the population of Irish subsidiaries of foreign MNCs, and find strong support for our theoretical predictions. The managerial implications of subsidiary entrepreneurship in generating creative strategy, prompting strategic initiatives and improving performance are discussed.

The contemporary MNC must co-ordinate the activities of a complex network of subsidiaries operating in diverse environments to create competitive advantage (Andersson et al., 2007). Yet while the benefits of individual subsidiaries interacting with their particular local environment to create knowledge and initiatives for dissemination across the MNC is increasingly accepted (Almeida and Phene, 2004, Birkinshaw et al., 1998, Hansen and Lovas, 2004 and Gnyawali et al., 2009), the potential for a subsidiary to exploit their local environment through developing subsidiary entrepreneurship has been underexplored (Young and Tavares, 2004). The ability of subsidiaries to access knowledge, ideas and opportunities within their specific environments (Andersson et al., 2002) has led to a gradual acknowledgement of their role in sourcing learning and generating innovations for diffusion and exploitation across the wider organisation (Mudambi and Navarra, 2004 and Mudambi, 2008). In response, a stream of literature (for example, Birkinshaw, 1997, Birkinshaw et al., 1998, Cantwell and Mudambi, 2005 and Andersson et al., 2007) has examined the role of subsidiary context—which Birkinshaw et al. (1998) define as ‘how the subsidiary relates to its parent, its corporate network [and] its local environment’ (p. 223)—on its ability to generate initiatives. We suggest that the development of entrepreneurship within subsidiaries allows MNCs to exploit their global networks more effectively. We argue that such ‘subsidiary entrepreneurship’ is associated with a combination of influences specific to the business of the subsidiary itself, its place within the MNC and its geographic location. This study contributes by identifying which elements of a subsidiary's context are associated with entrepreneurship at the unit level. We investigate the direct relationship between the two—an approach that has not (to our knowledge) been taken previously, despite increasing demands for organisations to generate creative strategic responses (Ford et al., 2008) to escalating environmental change. We then explore the mediating effects of entrepreneurship to gain deeper insights into how it amplifies the effect of subsidiary context on subsidiary contribution. Besides its potential for theory development, this area is particularly relevant to practitioners, as understanding how entrepreneurship influences subsidiaries' added value is critical to protecting their position within the MNC.

Research suggests that building entrepreneurship within subsidiaries is potentially beneficial to MNCs' long term results (Brock and Birkinshaw, 2004), but studies to date have focused on the direct influence of contextual elements on subsidiary contribution (Birkinshaw, 1997, Hewett et al., 2003, Rugman and Verbeke, 2003 and Taggart, 1998) and have failed to provide empirical evidence of the effects of entrepreneurship on subsidiary contribution. This study adopts a different approach, suggesting that subsidiary entrepreneurship—as represented by its entrepreneurial orientation—acts as a mediating variable or ‘generating mechanism’ (Baron and Kenny, 1986) enhancing its ability to make valuable contributions. This implies that, while headquarters may set the context for the subsidiary, the level of entrepreneurship within the subsidiary itself will facilitate how context influences contribution. Our findings demonstrate strong support for the mediating influence of entrepreneurship between subsidiary context and subsidiary strategy creativity and performance outcomes, providing a better understanding of how to improve subsidiary contribution to the MNC. This differs from the traditional investigations of direct context/contribution relationships, and implies that gaining a greater understanding of how context influences subsidiary outcomes requires subsidiary level factors such as subsidiary entrepreneurship to be investigated in tandem. There may also be other subsidiary level factors that act as ‘generating mechanisms’ which future research may explore—including, for example, subsidiary leadership style and technological posture. Our results also have strong theoretical implications. Most interestingly, the empirical evidence supports strong direct associations between subsidiary entrepreneurship and strategy creativity, initiative generation and performance. This contribution endorses subsidiary level anecdotal evidence, and suggests that local (and corporate) management should focus on enhancing subsidiaries' enthusiasm to be risk taking, proactive and innovative. However, Mudambi and Navarra's (2004) caution that entrepreneurial subsidiaries may be a source of competitive advantage that the MNC is unable to leverage, due to the level of power such subsidiaries often enjoy within the organisation, should be borne in mind. The limited significant direct associations between context and contribution highlight how difficult it is for MNC headquarters' management to enhance subsidiary contribution directly by manipulating organisational structural and behavioural context. The limited explanatory power of the contextual variables may suggest that their relationships with contribution are more contingent than direct, given the competitive environment and constant challenges faced by organisations. It may be that expecting a direct relationship between selected contextual dimensions and contribution is too simplistic, demonstrating again the need to adopt a more holistic perspective of subsidiary activities if a greater understanding of complex phenomena is to be achieved. The insights into the benefits of subsidiary entrepreneurship and the amplifying effects of entrepreneurship on subsidiary context are significant. Empirical evidence of the association between entrepreneurship and strategy creativity provides an exciting new addition to our understanding of the benefits of entrepreneurship, and may also have implications at the organisational level of analysis. This is an area not previously investigated—as Ford and Gioia (2000, pp. 705) note ‘despite enduring interest in creativity from practitioners and its apparent relevance to many areas of organisational study, the topic remains relatively underdeveloped in management research’. In addition, confirmation of the anecdotal relationship between entrepreneurship and an organisation's potential to break the rules and ‘think outside the box’ highlights the need for further research in this important topic.