This paper deals with the decentralized overlapping control of interconnected systems. The notion of a quotient overlapping fixed mode (QOFM) is first introduced and it is shown that a mode of an interconnected linear time-invariant system can be shifted by means of a general decentralized overlapping controller if and only if it is not a QOFM it is then asserted that any interconnected system with no unstable QOFM can be stabilized by using an appropriate finite-dimensional linear time-varying controller. It is also shown how the existing results aiming at designing a decentralized controller of a certain type such as generalized sampled-data hold function, finite-dimensional linear time-varying, and sampled-data can be utilized to design a decentralized overlapping controller of a desired form, in order to achieve any design specification. The efficacy of the results is elucidated through two numerical examples. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.