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Relative to the increasing focus on organisations’ outward communication consistency and coherency, the internal communication taking place between different organisational functions is under-explored. The study aims to address the following two research questions: What form does cross-functional communication take within organisations? How do features of the communication work climate influence the form of cross-functional communication?

The study draws on qualitative data generated from semi-structured interviews with media and marketing managers from 33 professional football organisations operating in the English Premier League.

Thematic patterns between internal communication practices and different communication climates lead to the development of a new internal organisational communications typology, comprising: Type 1: collaborative symmetrical communication (cohesive climate); Type 2: unstructured informal communication (friendly climate); and Type 3: cross-functional silos (divisive climate).

Internal organisational communication practices are deemed fundamental to organisational success, yet there remains limited empirical evidence of the form such practices take or how they interact with features of an organisation’s communication climate. The study introduces a new internal organisational communications typology to develop and extend the theory and practice of internal marketing communications.

This paper examines four underlying trends in the changing business environment relating to information technology and geographic, functional and sectorial integration. It discusses three required changes in management focus needed to reach global profitability from product inception to promotion. The skills required for this change are listed by functional area, although the techniques are predominantly cross‐cultural. This paper explains the steps needed to move from a traditional firm to a globally competitive network and the cultural barriers to building consumer‐focused extended‐value chains. Finally it discusses ways in which business school education can promote strategic thinking about profitability and heighten awareness of the potential gains from cooperative inter‐firm partnerships.

Business functions and business processes are two constructs that have emerged as key elements of the Reengineering and Benchmarking discourses. Historically there has been an implied dichotomy between functional “silos” and cross‐functional processes. It is contended that the resultant dualism has led to oversimplification of the interfaces in process based organisations. Seeks to extend the function‐process organisational constructs into a more multi‐faceted issue where many differing organisational groupings are linked by business processes, as in the case of network organisations. A multiple case research methodology was applied to organisations, which were at different stages of function‐process development. The key research question was to determine the key factors involved as an organisation moved from a more simple function‐process perspective to a more complex network‐process development. The findings indicated that process benchmarking was a key element throughout this development and that the approach taken to benchmarking also changed throughout.

Based on fifteen years of data on the annual Academy of International Business (AIB) best dissertation Farmer Award finalists, we find that these dissertations were done at a range of North American universities. Interestingly, dissertation topics differed from the topics covered in the three top IB journals with five‐sixths of the topics in management, organization, economics, or finance and two‐thirds set in a single country or region (U.S., Japan, North America, and Western Europe). Survey research is the most common methodology but analysis of secondary data is growing. As expected, the finalists are on average an extraordinarily prolific group.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how big data analytics capabilities (BDAC) enable the implementation of integrated business planning (IBP) – the advanced form of sales and operations planning (S&OP) – by counteracting the increasing information processing requirements.

The research model is grounded in the organizational information processing theory (OIPT). An embedded single case study on a multinational agrochemical company with multiple geographically distinguished sub-units of analysis was conducted. Data were collected in workshops, semistructured interviews as well as direct observations and enriched by secondary data from internal company sources as well as publicly available sources.

The results show the relevancy of establishing BDAC within an organization to apply IBP by providing empirical evidence of BDA solutions in S&OP. The study highlights how BDAC increase an organization's information processing capacity and consequently enable efficient and effective S&OP. Practical guidance toward the development of tangible, human and intangible BDAC in a particular sequence is given.

This study is the first theoretically grounded, empirical investigation of S&OP implementation journeys under consideration of the impact of BDAC.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the internal dynamics of cross-functional teams (CFTs) in different organizational processes in a service company.

A case study from a Brazilian service company was conducted. CFTs in five different organizational processes (strategy development, product development, portfolio management, sales channels management and business analysis) were analyzed through in-depth interviews, documents and non-participant observation.

A framework with four pillars was constructed: constitution of the CFT, task drivers, behavior and attitudes of the team and personal motivators. It was possible to analyze the process of how a group acts and reacts under changing circumstances based on the pillars included in the framework.

The study is focused on creating analytical generalizability. Several insights in the 12 propositions presented in this study may be investigated in future research to validate the identified relationships among the pillars included in the framework. Moreover, the proposed framework allows the teams to be analyzed through a multidimensional view: structure, processes and impacts.

If the semantic boundaries of the communication are not well delineated, the differences in understanding can generate manifest conflicts. Moreover, the workload in a CFT seems to be larger and more complex than working in a functional activity; however, members perceive that it reduces the risk of unemployment and increases motivation.

The present study contributes to the extant literature with the proposal of a set of new exploratory propositions that can support future quantitative research about the use of CFTs in the service industry context.

Many companies in many industries find themselves dealing with an over abundance of custom‐designed products, services and IT functions. Such complexity becomes unnecessary and value draining when companies fail to address the trade‐off between customization and complexity – between the costs associated with customization, the value derived from it, and the price that should be charged for it.

The authors show how to build an organization that routinely measures complexity and takes a continuous improvement approach to reducing it. This ensures that complexity is managed and customization that does not contribute to competitive advantage is eliminated.

Good complexity is necessary and adds value for the company and the customer. It is the kind required to customize products and services and help companies increase revenues, profits, and customer loyalty.

Ideally, the initial focus should be on identifying the complexity drivers across the organization and determining where modularization can reduce unnecessary complexity.

The company must obtain an in‐depth understanding of the tradeoffs between customization and complexity, and change its business processes and decision‐making to consider both internal challenges as well as its position in the marketplace. In the end, by weeding out the “bad” complexity, the company should see marked improvement in both its delivery capabilities and bottom‐line performance.

This study discusses the evolution of supply chain and the growing importance of dual marketing strategies. To understand the concept of dual marketing, we present a scenario faced by property developers in Malaysia on the impact of public policy on dual marketing strategy. This study is to uncover (1) the reasons why and how property developers adopt dual marketing strategy, (2) the impact of housing policy on the developers' dual marketing strategy and how they strategise to cope with the policy.

Business process implementation has been primarily seen as a redesign of the workflow with the consequent organizational change assumed to be taking place automatically or through a process of “muddling through”. Although evidence suggests that 70 per cent of business process reengineering programmes have failed due to lack of alignment with corporate change strategy, the question of alignment of workflow redesign with the organizational change process has not received adequate attention. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for managing organizational change in a structured manner during workflow redesign, a perspective missing in the literature on business process management (BPM) implementation.

This paper attempts to integrate the 8-S dimensions of Higgins model across the different phases of workflow redesign to develop a process framework of managing organizational change during BPM workflow redesign. As an exploratory study the paper draws on existing literature on BPM and change alignment to conceptualize an alignment framework of associated managerial activities involved during different phases of BPM workflow redesign. The framework is evaluated against two case studies of business process implementation to substantiate how lack of alignment leads to failure in BPM implementation.

The paper provides a conceptual framework of how organizational change should be managed during BPM implementation. The model suggests the sequence of alignment of the 8-S dimensions (Higgins, 2005) with the different phases of the workflow redesign and identifies the role of the managerial levels in the organization in managing the alignment of the 8-S dimensions during business process change.

This framework would provide managers with an execution template of how to achieve alignment of the workflow redesign with the 8-S dimensions thus facilitating effective organizational change during business process implementation.

This paper proposes a process model of how organizational elements should be aligned with the workflow redesign during business process change implementation. No such model is available in BPM literature proposing alignment between hard and soft factors.