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Today’s MNCs need to adopt smart ways of organizing to tap into the potential of their complex internal and external relationships. This requires MNCs to identify the relevant relationships and to develop appropriate relational skills and capabilities. Hence this chapter addresses two key questions: what kind of relational structures and qualities are conducive to value creation, and how can MNCs best develop and utilize their complex relationships?

The chapter reviews the main developments in the area of MNC organizing to date. Subsequently three examples of novel on-going research into MNC relationships are presented. Finally avenues for future research and links to related areas in international business research are discussed.

The relational perspective on the MNC is well-established. Past research, however, has mostly taken the view of the headquarters-subsidiary dyad without fully conceptualizing the multiplicity of relationships and interdependencies of individuals, groups, and units in the MNC. This chapter uncovers the relational skills required to improve MNC value creation abilities by influencing and leveraging connections among disparate units and individuals to tap their expertise and creative potential. This includes insights into abilities for managing and balancing multiple networks, abilities for mobilizing relevant network actors when driving bottom-up processes, and abilities for facilitating connections and collaboration among different actors.

This chapter advances the understanding and practice of multinational organizing. It presents novel ways to systematically address the complexities and interdependencies of relational effects on the ability of MNCs to create value.

Sayings like “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life” epitomize Western society’s emphasis on both the importance and assumed positive nature of passion for work. Although research has linked passion and increased well-being, growing anecdotal evidence suggests the potential for negative individual outcomes of work passion, including decreased well-being and increased stress and burnout. In the present chapter, the authors integrate the Dualistic Model of Passion (which consists of harmonious and obsessive passion), identity theory, and identity threat to describe the paradox of passion, in which individuals overidentify with the target of their passion (i.e., work), resulting in the “too much of a good thing” effect driven by excess passion of either type. The authors thus provide a novel theoretical lens through which to examine the different reactions that individuals may enact in response to threats to passion-related identities, including how these responses might differentially impact well-being, stress, and burnout. The authors conclude by offering future directions for research on the paradox of passion.

Past research has primarily focused on the negative impact of workplace mistreatment or aggression on the individuals involved, workgroups, and organizations. Certain circumstances, however, create paradoxical effects in which mistreatment positively relates to desirable workplace outcomes and characteristics at the individual and/or organizational level. Reviewing the theoretical and empirical evidence of beneficial outcomes provides researchers and practitioners with a more comprehensive understanding of the progression of workplace mistreatment, allowing them to target specific mechanisms to mitigate detrimental effects and potentially discover important avenues that lead to desired outcomes. A qualitative review of 13 articles demonstrated that different forms of aggression such as bullying, abusive supervision, incivility, and ostracism have positive relationships with paradoxical outcomes and characteristics such as resilience, prosocial behaviors, socially desirable behaviors, job performance, job satisfaction, and creativity. The authors caution against leveraging mistreatment as a method for producing these desired outcomes; instead, the authors encourage researchers and practitioners to utilize the information to further their understanding of the nomological network of workplace mistreatment and its underlying mechanisms, such as cognitive reappraisal and social learning.