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Effects Of Goal Interdependence And Social Identity On Departments And Their Relationships In China, Liyan Wang

Lingnan Theses

Synergy among departments is increasingly considered vital for organizations to use their full resources to deal with threats and explore opportunities in the rapidly changing marketplace. Although valuable, developing synergy among departments is a difficult management challenge.

Departments within organizations often have their own business goals, yet the coordination of these goals is a precondition for overall organizational effectiveness. The need for goal coordination makes departments interdependent (Thompson, 1967), but this interdependence may become particularly problematic when the different departmental goals are incompatible (St. John & Hall, 1991).

Because of the value of cooperative goals for coordination, managers want to …