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Top1. Introduction
Modern businesses have to thrive and grow in a dynamic and fast-changing World where the linkages between different dimensions of business are complex (Evans & Barhami, 2020). We know that the primary goal of corporate managers is to maximize the wealth of the shareholders (Queen, 2015). The wealth of the shareholders is increased not only by the Finance Manager but also by the other functional managers- like, by the Human Resource Manager which gets the right talent required to perform the jobs at the right cost; or by the Supply Chain Manager who procures the right material at the right time and the right cost, or by the Engineering Manager who designs the product and the process that meets the customer requirements, or by the Production Manager who converts the raw material into finished goods at optimal cost, or by the Quality Manager who improves the processes to make them leaner.
The objective of maximizing the returns for the shareholders can be best accomplished by managers who can look at the holistic picture from the overall organizational perspective rather than focusing on their problems (Zhu et al., 2022). We often observe that different functions in an organization conflict with each other by the nature of the work that they do (Wang et al., 2022). Not only this, but even within a function, the different sub-functions have trade-offs among them. In such a scenario, it becomes very essential to develop managers who have the cognitive capability as well as the emotional intelligence to make cross-functional decisions that create value for the firm, the economy, and the society at large (Alam et al., 2022).
Unless all the functional managers align themselves to the organizational strategy, the objective of wealth maximization cannot be achieved in a sustainable manner (Hristov et al., 2022). The concept of matrix structure in the organization design was developed to support this phenomenon. For example, we may often see a sales manager having a dotted line reporting to the CFO to ensure that the profit margins on his/her sales transactions do not fall below a threshold level.
Also, if we look from the perspective of a learner, most of the decisions that get taken by managers today will be automated eventually with digitalization. The decisions that require relatively higher cognitive and interpersonal skills will be done by the managers. And such decisions are generally complex and inter-disciplinary. So, a learner with a cross-functional bent of mind will be able to outperform the ones who keep their knowledge limited to their specific domain.
While the business school programs expose the students to all the areas of management through different courses, there is hardly any research that has been done on the cross-functional pedagogy style of a course, where the course is linked to the other courses in the program curriculum at appropriate touchpoints during the delivery. Therefore, the Research Question (RQ) in this study is whether the cross-functional style of pedagogy helps achieve the course learning outcomes better.
To make the meaning of the word “cross-functional” more clear, let us have a look at a few cross-functional projects in the industry.