Assigning a task to a team composed of multi-disciplinary individuals increases the level of creativity and establishes common opinion.
Some researchers have viewed cross-functional interactions as cooperative or competitive in nature, while others have argued that organization's functional areas are often forced to compete and cooperate simultaneously with one another (“coopetition”) and it is critical to understand how these complex relationships interplay and affect firm performance.
A group of individuals of various backgrounds and disciplines are assembled to collaborate in an efficient manner in order to better the organization or solve a problem.
The growth of self-directed cross-functional teams has influenced decision-making processes and organizational structures.
Although management theory likes to propound that every type of organizational structure needs to make strategic, tactical, and operational decisions, new procedures have started to emerge that work best with teams.
An inherent benefit of a cross-functional team is the breadth of knowledge brought to the group by each member.
This increases the efficiency of a cross-functional team by reducing time spent gathering information.
It gets strategic direction from top management, and uses operational departments like engineering and marketing to perform its task.
In many cases, the team would make unstructured strategic decisions—such as what markets to compete in, what new production technologies to invest in, and what return on investment to require; tactical decisions like whether to build a prototype, whether to concept-test, whether to test-market, and how much to produce; and structured operational decisions like production scheduling, inventory purchases, and media flightings.
Technical, financial, marketing, and all other types of information must come in a form that all members of a cross-functional team can understand.
This involves reducing the amount of specialized jargon, sorting information based on importance, hiding complex statistical procedures from the users, giving interpretations of results, and providing clear explanations of difficult.
[citation needed] Cross-functional teams, using unstructured techniques and searching for revolutionary competitive advantages, allegedly require information systems featuring increased interactivity, more flexibility, and the capability of dealing with fuzzy logic.
Many teams in large organizations face challenges around creating a collaborative atmosphere when dealing with cross-functional dependencies and peers from other functions.
[8] It becomes important for the organizations to build a culture among its employees, a sense of entitlement with each of the stakeholders to push them to give an extra effort and collaborate with other teams to achieve company goals.