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departments represent structural elements of the organization by way of the design of the organization and its hierarchical structure (Hall 1991). Structural elements are characteristic of organization redesign and reengineering, which makes functions and departments more permanent in nature than teams. The basis underlying the existence of a particular function or department is predicated on that respective function or department having a unique capability to cope effectively with a critical external environment. Coping enables the respective organization to plan, organize, manage, direct, and control its activities as it pursues multiple objectives simultaneously (Hall 1991; Lawrence and Lorsch 1986). Departments have particular topical environments and focal objectives surrounding economic, social, scientific, and technical domains (Lawrence and Lorsch 1967, 1986; Woodward 1965). For example, finance would be typically attributed with overseeing the fiscal-economic domain, marketing would be attributed with the socioeconomic domain, operations/production would be attributed with the economic-technical domain, and R&D would be connected with the scientific-technical domain. When issues address one particular arena, only functional expertise is needed. When issues cross environments/domains, initiatives require multiple inputs and multiple resources to tap into expertise addressing each of the respective domains. Efforts stimulating interaction, coordination, and collaboration across departments therefore become necessary and should be spearheaded by management. Functions represent distinct groups of personnel who serve as specialists in achieving a set of given objectives and corresponding activities. Functions are permanent elements of the organization as long as the organization deems those objectives as relevant and as long as the respective skill set remains required. Departments are a higher construct, and are viewed as the level of organization structure that encompasses multiple functions. Compared to functions, departments are more permanent in nature, pending major shifts in the organization structure due to management intervention. For example, the marketing department under the auspices of the chief marketing officer subsumes the advertising function. The advertising function- akin to other functions such as product management and marketing research- will remain in the marketing department as long as the organization chooses not to outsource that function. Between the terminology of functions and departments, the present paper adopts the terminology of function due to the diversity of the marketing department and the number of existing marketing functions (Krohmer, Homburg, and Workman 2002). Interfunctional can readily apply to those initiatives that require an alignment of incentives, the creation of interdependency, and a responsiveness to the perceptions and needs across multiple functions (Narver and Slater 1990). In addition, functions in smaller companies may equate to departments when such departments are unidimensional- that is, charged with only one overriding task. THE INTERFUNCTIONAL DOMAIN Lawrence and Lorsch' s (1986) seminal work indicates that effective companies are those companies that can achieve proper differentiation and integration of functions within a company. Differentiation is defined as the state of segmentation of the organization into functions, with each developing particular attributes in