Coordination to market technology: The contribution of cooperative goals and interaction

Marketing managers must facilitate coordination among employees from sales, engineering, training, and support to market technology successfully. Thirty-six employees of a branch marketing division of a multi-national computer and office automation company were interviewed on problems they solved effectively and ineffectively with people from different departments. Results support the theory of cooperation and competition and indicate that cooperative goals coupled with open-minded, constructive controversy greatly contribute to serving customers and strengthening work relationships. This study suggests antecedents for cooperative goals, empirically develops categories of interactions, and suggests that cooperation theory can also be used to analyze coordination between marketing and other divisions.