Toward a Contingency Theory of Multibusiness Organization Design

In this paper I develop a contingency model of organization design for multibusiness enterprises - those competing simultaneously in several different business areas - and compare this model to the one underlying most single-business contingency research. Three important differences emerge: (1) the degree to which management influences contextual variables, (2) the nature of the casual relationship between contextual and organizational variables, and (3) the way in which these two kinds of variables are distributed.