Blending Leadership Efficacy and Organizational Design Agility in a Multinational Enterprise

This research attempts to contribute to organizational theory by exploring the impact of leadership efficacy on an innovative multidimensional organizational design that has the advantage of collaborative opportunity exploitation in a dynamic global market. In the company case, the design includes dimensions that relate to products and services, geographic locations, support functions, and clients. This multidimensional organizational design is applied to a multi-unit business that includes a global value chain. A multinational enterprise must be competitively agile in its dynamic market while managing through an otherwise complex organizational construct. The author proposes a minimalist role of the corporate center with the addition of secondary work structures, or collaboration platforms, that exploit capabilities across business units. These lateral integrative mechanisms reduce costs that would otherwise be overhead in a traditional M-form structure.Structure does not in and of itself solve all problems. Leadership through an effective structure will lead to a much more robust and agile organization that will be more profitable along a longer organizational life-cycle.