infonet-economy

This paper uses a comparative case study approach to explain how multichannel firms adapt their organizational design to adequately respond to a disruptive change in the environment - the so-called research shopping phenomenon. Although there is significant research on how firms adapt their organizational design to facilitate innovations driven by incremental contingency misfits with the environment, there still is a relatively limited understanding of how firms adjust their organization design to foster innovations based on disruptive changes in the environment. Based on 69 interviews with 63 top and middle managers from eight multichannel retailers, we extend previous research on organizational design adaptation as well as multibusiness organization and propose a framework consisting of four ideal routes of organizational design adaptation multichannel retailers can adopt to structurally cope with the disruptive change in consumer behavior. We focus on a) changes in organization structure, b) cross-channel collaboration, and c) locus of decision-making of multichannel incumbents to derive these four distinctive routes of organizational design adaptation. Our results show how each route differs in its capacity to promote the adoption of the research-shopping phenomenon and illustrate the four identified routes with examples of German and Swiss multichannel retailers.