Autonomy, Embeddedness, and the Performance of Foreign Owned Subsidiaries

This paper investigates whether changes in autonomy and embeddedness in host locations by foreign owned subsidiaries are associated with improvements in performance by subsidiaries. The results provide evidence that increasing operational decision-making autonomy is associated with enhanced performance as measured by both subjective and more objective measures of performance. The results on the importance of increasing strategic decision-making autonomy and embeddedness are less clear, with improved performance being detected in some cases, but only for the subjective measure of performance. © 2008, Emerald Group Publishing Limited