Organizing for Synergies

Robert Gertner, Luis Garicano and Wouter Dessein ()

No 6019, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Multi-product firms create value by integrating functional activities such as manufacturing across business units. This integration often requires making functional managers responsible for implementing standardization, thereby limiting business-unit managers? authority. Realizing synergies then involves a tradeoff between motivation and coordination. Motivating managers requires narrowly-focused incentives around their area of responsibility. Functional managers become biased toward excessive standardization and business-unit managers may misrepresent local market information to limit standardization. As a result, integration may be value-destroying when motivation is sufficiently important. Providing functional managers only with "dotted-line control" (where business-unit managers can block standardization) has limited ability to improve the tradeoff.

Keywords: Communication; Coordination; Incentives; Incomplete contracts; Merger implementation; Organizational design; Scope of the firm; Task allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D2 D8 L2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Journal Article: Organizing for Synergies (2010)
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