Organizational Change & Cross-Functional Teams

In today's ever-changing, competitive environment, Cross-Functional Teams (CFTs) are an increasingly popular organizational response to implement major business transformations within multinationals. Yet empirical data supports the 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 CFTs dedicated to organizational change enable or hinder such 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 final stages of a project; when practicing shared leadership; and when organized as a semi-structure. Keywords: Organizational Change, Cross-Functional Team, Practice-based Approach, Multinational Corporations