Aligning the IT portfolio with business strategy: Evidence for complementarity of corporate and business unit alignment

•We examine the effects of cross-domain alignment in multi-business organizations.•We distinguish between corporate domain alignment and BU domain alignment.•Corporate domain alignment and BU domain alignment jointly affect BU performance.•BU process digitization moderates the effects of corporate and BU domain alignment.•We introduce the idea of success dilemma for BUs in multi-business organizations.