How Firms Make Boundary Decisions: The Role of Hierarchy Span and Expertise Span

We report findings from an analysis of 234 firm boundary decisions that a manufacturing firm has made during a 10 year period. Extensive interviews with all major decision makers located both at the headquarters and subsidiaries allow us to examine (a) who was involved in each boundary decision, and (b) how the firm arrived at a particular transactional choice in each decision. We find that decision makers extensively adapt decision structures in order to effectively make governance mode choices. They adapt hierarchy span, i.e. the number of hierarchical levels involved, and expertise span, i.e. the number of same-level decision makers with dissimilar knowledge basis. We observe that decision makers heavily rely on varying hierarchy and expertise span in order to improve the quality of the decision outcome. Central to the adaption of decision structures is that decision makers, over time and as novelty decreases, substitute hierarchy span with expertise span. We conclude that this substitution mechanism is core for our understanding of how decision structures are used when firms attempt to achieve transactional alignment.