Organizational practice transfer within a transnational professional service firm: the role of leadership and control

Abstract

Most cross-border organizational practice transfer involves implementation challenges, yet key literature in this field largely overlooks the mediating role of the transfer coalition, which serves as a ‘bridge’ between headquarters and subsidiaries in transferring an organizational practice. By exploring an in-depth case study of a top-tier professional service firm, this study contributes to the literature on cross-border human resource management practice transfer. We show that the transfer coalition displayed activities that translated into two separate managerial roles – transfer leadership and control – that were practiced with quite different levels of commitment by different members and impacted the successful management of the transfer process. We propose two distinctive transfer coalition archetypes – the entrepreneurial and the ceremonial type – where the leadership and control roles were practiced quite differently and reached different levels of organizational practice adoption. Furthermore, we suggest practical implications for HR professionals in order to improve global leadership and control competence.

Keywords:

• organizational control
• organizational practice transfer
• professional service firms
• transfer leadership
• transnational corporations

Acknowledgements

The authors greatly appreciate comments from editor Paula Caligiuri and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and encouragement. Furthermore, we are grateful for the constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper from participants at the international management track at the EURAM conference 2013 in Istanbul and at a workshop at Leuphana University in Lüneburg in 2013.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. To be precise, there are also further relevant leadership roles at the office level such as office-level leaders of the four service lines, but for improving readability we will also refer to them all as Office Managing Partners.

^2. To protect the anonymity of The Firm, key descriptions have to remain vague.