Facilitating Discontinuous Strategic Renewal : Routes of Organizational Design Adaptation
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2013-09-10
Author(s)
Abstract
This paper uses a comparative case study approach to explain how multichannel firms adapt their organizational design to adequately respond to a disruptive change in the environment - the so-called research shopping phenomenon. Although there is significant research on how firms adapt their organizational design to facilitate innovations driven by incremental contingency misfits with the environment, there still is a relatively limited understanding of how firms adjust their organization design to foster innovations based on disruptive changes in the environment. Based on 69 interviews with 63 top and middle managers from eight multichannel retailers, we extend previous research on organizational design adaptation as well as multibusiness organization and propose a framework consisting of four ideal routes of organizational design adaptation multichannel retailers can adopt to structurally cope with the disruptive change in consumer behavior. We focus on a) changes in organization structure, b) cross-channel collaboration, and c) locus of decision-making of multichannel incumbents to derive these four distinctive routes of organizational design adaptation. Our results show how each route differs in its capacity to promote the adoption of the research-shopping phenomenon and illustrate the four identified routes with examples of German and Swiss multichannel retailers.
Language
English
Keywords
Top-Driven Strategic Change
Organizational Design Adaptation
Multibusiness Collaboration
Multiple Case Design
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
Yes
Book title
BAM 2013: Managing to Make a Difference
Publisher
British Academy of Management
Publisher place
London UK
Event Title
27th British Academy of Management (BAM) Annual Conference
Event Location
Liverpool, UK
Event Date
10.-12.09.2013
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
224230