The Roads Not Taken: Issue Selling and Post-decisional Sensemaking in Multinational Corporations

Abstract Research in international business has a rich legacy of exploring headquarters-subsidiaries relationships. Nevertheless, a focus on mandate allocation by corporate headquarters remains underdeveloped, and has largely ignored critical aspects of issue selling by local subsidiaries. Specifically, understanding those initiatives suggested by local managers but rejected by headquarters remains rather uncharted territory in this literature. Our focus is on these ‘rejected issues’ (RIs) and we contend that these RIs have a far-reaching agency that often violates local actors’ expectations in multinational corporations. We frame RIs as emotional stimuli and, through the lens of emotional contagion, we elucidate post-decisional sensemaking by implicated actors. We develop a conceptual framework and a series of propositions linked to organizational integration and we caution against an asymmetrical focus on “visible” outcomes at the expense of latent aspects that remain influential for integration purposes in multinational corporations.