Enabling Conditions for Organizational Change Production by Cross Functional Teams in Multinational Corporations : An In-Depth Multi Cases Study of the Marketing, Sales and Distribution Transformation in Pharmaceutical Multinational Companies

• Main Author: Baldy Ngayo, Christine
• Language: ENG
• Published: HEC 2011
• Subjects: [SHS:GESTION] Humanities and Social Sciences/Business administration; Organizational change; Cross-functional team; Practice-based approch; Multinational corporations
• Online Access: http://pastel.archives-ouvertes.fr/pastel-00708802; http://pastel.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/70/88/02/PDF/Baldy.pdf

In today's ever-changing, competitive business environment, cross-functional teams are an increasingly popular mechanism to implement major business transformations within multinationals. Yet empirical data (Kotter, 1995; Beer, Eisenstat and Spector, 1990; Beer, 2000; Stvetena and Damian, 2006) support for the prevailing view that such teams, unless they are well managed, lead to failure. By drawing on an in depth comparative study of one Pilot Team and four teams dedicated to marketing, sales and distribution transformation in two pharmaceutical companies, we examine under which internal conditions cross-functional teams dedicated to organizational change enable or hinder organizational change within multinational corporations. The findings suggest that they succeed best through high level coupling activities with the remainder of the organization during the early and the later phases of a project, when practicing shared leadership and when organized as a semi-structure. This study contributes to the literature on organizational change in transcending the paradoxical relationships between stability and change, to the literature on the practice-based approach in making more explicit the relationships between practices and organizations and provides implications for managers involved in major business transformations in multinational corporations.