The struggle for strategic alignment in multinational corporations:: Managing readjustment during global expansion

As corporations expand internationally, their ability to align their internal business strategies and management practices to conditions in external marketplaces becomes critical for sustaining growth and expanding market share. When international expansion decisions become 'unaligned' with business strategy, organizational structure, and managerial processes, corporations can lose sales and market share, incur increasing costs and inefficiencies, generate discontent among customers and suppliers, engender internal organizational conflict, and lose strategic direction. Spontaneous international expansion creates challenging opportunities for some managers, but makes others confused about their roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships.