You can transform an object and its pivot without affecting its children using the buttons in Hierarchy/Pivot/Adjust Transform rollout. Adjusting an object’s transforms has no effect on any children linked to that object.
Don’t Affect Children: Turn on to limit transforms to the selected object and its axis, not to its children.
Transform: Select to reset the orientation of an objects local axis coordinates to align with the world coordinate system, regardless of the current orientation of the object.
This does not affect descendants.
When applied to closed groups, it aligns the dummy node of the parent, but keeps the children in the same place. It reorients and resizes the dummy node to correctly bind the children of the group.
Scale: Resets the scale values in the transformation matrix to reflect the new scale of the object. There is no visual change in the object.
You can use the Scale to correct Non Uniform Scale inheritance problems. If Non Uniform Scale is inherited by a child object in a hierarchy, it can result in an undesirable deformation in the child object. To correct for this, use Scale in the Adjust Transform rollout on an object before linking.
You can view the scale values of the transformation matrix of a selected object. On the toolbar, turn on the Scale button, then right click over any of the three toolbar Transform buttons (move, rotate, and scale).
The XYZ values are re-initialized to 100%. This operation will prevent Non Uniform Scale inheritance if a child object is linked to this object.
See the Adjust Pivot rollout for related information.