It is widely accepted that an organization's internal design should be contingent on the nature of its external environment. Yet attempts to construct simple contingency relationships - i.e., one-to-one mappings from environmental conditions to appropriate design elements - have met with limited...

Organizational design affects performance via coupled search processes. At low frequency, managers search for appropriate organizational designs. At higher frequency, managers use designs to search for high-performing operational choices. The two searches are coupled: organizational design molds...

We examine how a firm's formal organizational structure affects its ability to cope with interdependent decisions. An agent-based simulation, in which firms struggle to discover good sets of decisions, allows us to examine four coordinating mechanisms that have rarely been analyzed jointly: the...