Transnational Top Management Team:Establishing a theoretical concept and exploring subsidiary power in the context of team membership

Abstract

As companies strive to launch projects that are both globally driven and locally responsive, they realized the need to include individuals with global experiences and others with local knowledge in transnational teams. Researches were conducted on many types of management teams and multinational teams in business, but little is known about Transnational Top Management Team (TTMT), the member of which are the top managers and heads of different business units of the company. The first purpose of this thesis is to conduct extensive literature review on teams in business, based on which a conceptual framework of TTMT is proposed. Secondly, this thesis further elaborates the proposed conceptual framework towards new theoretical TTMT concept by conducting an empirical study. Thirdly, the study investigates how subsidiary’s membership in TTMT affects its power. The empirical result indicated that the degree of subsidiary autonomy and influence over corporate strategic behavior are differently affected by subsidiary’s participation in TTMT, and depend on the team task. Further implications of two-level team structure are also discussed.