Volume 12, Number 2, 2003
Sharon Watson likes to start off her international business management classes each semester by passing out a list of common household products and asking the students which ones they think are produced by U.S. companies.
Most of the students are surprised, she says, when they learn that such American-sounding brands as Dove soap, Hellmann's mayonnaise and Lipton tea are part of the Anglo-Dutch corporation Unilever and that the Swiss conglomerate Nestlé owns Coffee-Mate, Juicy Juice and Stouffer's Lean Cuisine.
"It can be a real eye-opener, especially for undergraduates, to see how globalized today's business has become," Watson, associate professor in the Lerner College of Business and Economics, says.
Watson's own international perspective began with a high school student-exchange trip to Belgium and continued with an undergraduate study-abroad program in Italy. She pursued a master's degree in Italian art history, spending a year in Florence, and then earned master's and doctoral degrees in business with a focus on international and strategic management.
Her current research centers on multinational corporations, particularly management issues that occur within foreign subsidiaries of those corporations. It's a topic that is important to an ever-increasing number of businesses, she says.
"In recent decades, not only are there more multinational corporations, but those companies have more worldwide competition and their customers have become more global, as well," Watson says. "This means that they have customers around the world, many of which are other companies that are likely to be multinational themselves."
As an example of such globalization, she notes that Kodak and Fuji are the principal suppliers in the global film market. The two corporations compete against each other in the United States, where Kodak is headquartered, and in Japan, the home of Fuji, but they also compete head to head virtually everywhere in the world. Such multinational corporations, Watson says, face a host of management issues as they seek ways to compete globally, serve customers globally and work effectively.
"I focus on one unit of these companies--the foreign subsidiary--because a multinational corporation is not just one giant corporation," she says. "It's a collection of foreign subsidiaries, and all of those subsidiaries are businesses in their own right."
Many subsidiaries that might once have operated autonomously, serving only their local markets, now must serve the broader corporate goals of their multinational owners, Watson says, creating new and complex management challenges. Some of her recent research has examined how corporations can design incentive compensation systems that make their managers more effective on a global level. She is beginning work on another study to explore additional ways corporations can develop internationally successful managers.
"Companies generally report that they have some very good international managers but not enough of them," says Watson, who conducts most of her research by surveying selected companies. "We're looking at the question of what characteristics make a manager effective in an international situation--personality type, cultural sensitivity and international experience are a few possible factors--and then we're looking at the kinds of things a company can do to develop those global management skills."
Her findings might help corporations design training, career-development and reward systems specifically tailored to improve the international skills of their managers.
One reward system Watson already has studied, incentive compensation, can be a useful tool, she says. Linking a manager's incentive compensation to corporation-wide goals and performance, not just to subsidiary or individual performance, encourages global effectiveness, she says.
By using corporate surveys as the starting point of her research, Watson says she gets data that is more likely to be applicable to other companies. The alternative, using corporate case studies, would yield more detailed data, but that data would not be as generalizable, she says.
She does a substantial amount of advance work designing her surveys, researching corporations to determine their makeup and ownership and selecting the appropriate people to receive the surveys. Then, numerous follow-up contacts are needed to get as high a return as possible.
"The hardest part is sending the survey to the right people and getting them to respond," she says. "I try to sample broadly, across many companies, to get results that can be generalized. The challenge in designing the survey is to limit the variables enough to get a clear picture, while not leaving out any key variables."
Watson also has conducted research into how a multinational corporation can foster interdependence and cooperation among its various subsidiaries and how those subsidiaries interact with their host governments. In the future, she says she hopes to explore the subject of international mergers and acquisitions, looking at what corporations can do to increase the chance that such mergers will be successful.
Watson has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Dartmouth College, a master's degree in business administration from the University of Buffalo and a doctorate in international business from the University of South Carolina. She joined the UD faculty in 1997.
She has published articles in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of International Management and Strategic Management Journal, among other professional publications, and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Management. In 1998, she received the Academy of Management's Best International Paper Award.
In her teaching as well as her research, she says, she always is aware of how quickly the international business picture is changing. A reminder of that fact comes at the start of every semester, when she prepares her list of domestic and foreign-owned brands to distribute to students and invariably finds that some of the products or companies have changed hands in the past months.
"That exercise is a learning experience for me as well as the students," she says. "Things change so much in the world of multinational corporations that I have to research the list all over again each time I use it."
--Ann Manser, AS '73, CHEP '73