Do Group and Organizational Identification Help or Hurt Intergroup Strategic Consensus?

Implementing strategy demands an organizationwide effort, where teams should not operate in isolation. A challenge many organizations face in implementing their strategy is eradicating silo thinking and creating shared understanding of strategy between interdependent teams—that is, intergroup strategic consensus. However, strategy process research is silent on how such intergroup strategic consensus can emerge. Drawing on social identity theory, we offer a lens to understand what influences the degree of intergroup strategic consensus. We unveil a tension between organizational and group identification such that organizational identification enhances intergroup strategic consensus, whereas group identification reduces it. Moreover, we hypothesize that high group identification crowds out positive effects of organizational identification on intergroup strategic consensus. Data from 451 intergroup relationships between 92 teams within a service organization support these hypotheses. We replicate our results using 191 intergroup relationships between 37 teams from another organization. These results allow us to develop an understanding of intergroup strategic consensus, expand the conversation in strategy process research to between-team interdependencies, and challenge the assumption in management literature and practice that higher identification is always desirable

The Dark Side of Visionary Leadership in Strategy Implementation:Strategic Alignment, Strategic Consensus, and Commitment

Drawing from visionary leadership and strategy process research, we theorize and test the mechanism through which middle and lower-level managers’ visionary leadership affects their teams’ strategic commitment. The management literature extols the virtues of visionary leadership. In contrast to this positive stance, we reveal a dark side to visionary leadership. Our theoretical framework suggests that team manager visionary leadership harms team strategic consensus when the manager is not strategically aligned with the CEO, which in turn diminishes team commitment to the strategy. In contrast, when a team manager is strategically aligned with the CEO, team manager visionary leadership is positively related to team strategic consensus and subsequently to team strategic commitment. Data from 136 teams from two organizations support our moderated mediation model. A supplemental analysis of the content of strategic consensus and additional qualitative interviews with managers and employees in one of these organizations provide additional insights concerning the meaning of the theorized relations in practice