Indian Multinationals in Developed Countries: A Case Study on Cultural Strategies

Multinational firms from emerging economies have been steadily climbing up the success ladder and have emerged as challenging and strong global contenders. They have proved to be facilitators of globalization and several of them have hailed from emerging regions, including India and China, which have become important parts of today’s globalized economy. The rapid rise of emerging economies and their multinational firms has opened up many opportunities, as well as raised many challenges (Singh, 2012; Marinov and Marinova, 2014). It has been pointed out time and again that this subject lacks systematic research and is far from mature (Goldstein, 2005; Aulakh, 2007). Moreover, the extant literature is largely focused on the perspectives of Western multinationals (Almond, Edwards, Colling, Ferner, Gunnigle, Mueller-Camen, Quintanilla and Waechter, 2005; Gamble, 2003; Edward and Ferner, 2004; Farley, Hoenig and Yang, 2004; Chen, Lawler and Bae, 2005). There is a gap in research on multinationals from emerging economies (MEEs), since extant research has rarely examined management practices of MEEs in their subsidiaries in developed countries (Chang, Mellahi and Wilkinson, 2009). Since this is a more recent phenomena, it has attracted insufficient research (Sim and Pandian, 2003; Sim, 2006; Aulakh, 2007), and even less in the case of Indian multinational firms. The different perspectives of these multinationals are important as they have adopted unique management styles (Bruton and Lau, 2008).