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Environmental Dependence and Departmental Structure: Case of the Marketing Function

This paper reports the results of a study examining the relationships between market and customer dependencies and the structure of the marketing departments (boundary-spanning units) in 44 electronics/telecommunications companies in Canada. Data were collected by means of personal interviews with senior management and marketing officials in each company. The results show that product market dependency has positive effects on specialization and the level of integration of the marketing function, while customer dependency has a positive impact on centralization of decision making in the departments. When these relationships were compared in high and low performing firms in the sample, they were mostly evident only in more succesful ones. In addition, product market dependency had a positive impact on departmentalformalization in more successful units. Implications of the findings for research on dependence-structure relationships are discussed.