The antecedents of cross-functional coordination and their implications for marketing adaptiveness

As the gap between accelerating rate of change and organizational capability in responding to it widens, managers face increasing challenges to coordinate and align diverse intra-firm functions. Although coordination across functions in an organization is necessary for integrating complex resources such as responding to uncertainty in business environments, little is known about the internal conditions of a firm in which cross-functional coordination influences marketing adaptiveness. Marketing adaptiveness recognizes the potential conflicting goals of intra-firm functions, and the need to identify disparate but interdependent organizational resources to fit the external environment. In order to account for the potential interactions of multiple conditions in cross-functional coordination, we use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to analyze survey data of 274 managers in Egyptian firms operating in uncertain environments based on the motivation-ability-opportunity framework and configuration theory. The findings show that the causal pathways leading to cross-functional coordination and marketing adaptiveness can be enhanced by resource dependency, cross-functional teams, multifunctional training, and management support. In particular, management support is a crucial condition for coordination in support of cross-functional teams and multifunctional training. While resource dependency is an important internal factor for coordination, a high resource dependency can result in a negative effect on marketing adaptiveness.