ABSTRACT
Increasing international competition creates more complex environments for managers to deal with. The diversity of countries, customer behavior, and management styles requires local adaptations combined with a global strategy.2 New organizational structures and administrative mechanisms are designed to cope with this increased diversity. Multinational corporations have adapted various solutions, such as decentralization, divisionalization, and matrix structures to reduce the strategic variety that top managers have to cope with at the corporate level, but they are not sufficient. Top managers have to develop a “world view” or “mind-set.”3 Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) argued that “the task is not to build a sophisticated structure, but to create a matrix in the minds of managers.”4 Moreover the executives in the top management team have the particular function to integrate strategies across business sectors and geographical zones. Consequently, the complexity of top managers’ mental maps of their competition should match the complexity of their international strategic systems.5
