Speed and Scope of Strategic Response to an Environmental Change: The Case of the United States Trucking Industry's Deregulation

235 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993.This study empirically investigates strategic change in terms of how different organizations responded to the same, new environment. This study takes the mid-range approach between the two extremes of determinism and voluntarism views, accepting the influence of the external environment on organizations and yet believing in organizations' freedom and ability to cope with the changing environment.A model is developed which incudes prior strategy and slack as the major--and controllable--factors and other factors such as size and age of organizations, prior performance, and change in top management. The model is used to test the influence of each factor on the dynamics between the inertial nature of organizations and the changing force caused by industry deregulation, resulting in different speed and scope of strategic change.This study produced major findings about the relationship between dimensions of strategic change, the role of strategy, and the role of organizational slack. The results highlight the complexity of the strategic change concept and the slack concept. Though many firms were found to have used an unfocused strategy in the regulated environment, massive transition to a focused strategy by the sample firms after deregulation shows that a focused strategy is pursued by more firms in a competitive environment. Focused strategies were found to facilitate further strategic change, making faster and broader change possible. This study also found that slack can buffer organizations from the environment and provide sources of proactive change at the same time, an important finding because research on slack to date has focused on one or the other of two functions. In addition, this study's conformation that different types of slack can play different roles in strategic decisions making is also a significant finding. The final important finding is that speed and scope have distinctly different relationships with key strategic variables; this suggests that the effect of various factors on 'strategic change as a simple concept' may be misleading, unless different dimensions of strategic change are distinguished and specified.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

The Faster, The Better?: An Empirical Study On The Speed Of Strategic Change And Firm Survival And Performance

This study questions the conventional wisdom that strategic change and a rapid pace of change are necessary for firm survival in a changing environment. Recognizing the potential costs of strategic change, we argue that conventional wisdom might be oversimplified. Drawing on the U.S. trucking industry and its deregulation, this paper concludes that mere change in strategy is insufficient to guarantee organizational survival and success, and hasty change may exert a negative impact on firm performance. Conclusions drawn from this study should be given appropriate caveats since we focus on conditions idiosyncratic to strategic change prompted by industry deregulation

Balancing absorptive capacity and inbound open innovation for sustained innovative performance: an attention-based view

How can a firm develop new ideas and turn them into profitable innovations on a sustained basis? We address this fundamental issue in a novel way by developing an integrative framework of absorptive capacity (AC) and inbound open innovation that is rooted in the attention-based view of the firm. We specifically address why a balance between open and closed innovation is important from the perspective of absorptive capacity, and show how it may be brought about. Pursuing either open or closed inbound innovation alone may result in an imbalance between potential AC and realized AC as well as inward-looking AC and outward-looking AC, which will hinder innovative performance.We argue that practicing open and closed inbound innovation repeatedly and alternately by switching organizational attentions, and thus developing the associated AC, can facilitate balancing absorptive capacity and lead to innovative performance

The Applicability of Porter’s Generic Strategies in the Digital Age: Assumptions, Conjectures, and Suggestions

On behalf of