Mapping strategic consensus within and between teams

Organisational scholars have been aware for some time that achieving a high degree of shared understanding about the strategy within the enterprise is extremely valuable. However, until now, managers have had few good tools for monitoring shifts in opinion at a granular level – and without that, most executives have had to simply reiterate the same messages again and again

Aspiration formation and attention rules

Research Summary: The behavioral theory of the firm (BTOF) proposes that firm behavior is goal-directed and that organizational aspirations are a function of prior historical aspirations, past performance, and the performance of others. Despite the centrality of aspirations in the BTOF, little is known about aspiration formation and why firms favor one aspiration type over others, that is, attention rules. Drawing on the attention-based view, we posit that attention rules are shaped by environmental volatility over time and vary by locus of attention across firms. Data from US manufacturing firms managing their toxic chemical waste provide evidence for attention-rule adaptation. Managerial Summary: Firms must set aspirations, measure, and improve their toxic waste levels to avoid costly economic, regulatory, and environmental hazards. Although aspirations play a vital role in driving firm behavior, we still have limited understanding of how managers allocate their attention to various performance feedback during aspiration formation. We argue that attention allocation differs for managers across organizational hierarchy exposed to varying degrees of environmental volatility. Greater volatility of the business environment steers managerial attention from the performance of others toward their own historical aspirations. We also suggest that the attention of managers at higher levels of the organizational structure are directed from their own historical aspirations toward performance of others. We find corroborating evidence for our conjectures.</p

Affective Leadership in Agile Teams

Agile management prescribes a set of structures and processes to help teams respond to change. This article presents an in-depth case study examining how high- and low-agility nursing teams differed in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizational restructuring, and floods. It unveils the crucial role of “affective leaders” in high-agility teams during those crises. These leaders constructed positive emotional experiences for their teams to successfully respond to adversity. The findings remind scholars and practitioners that agile management’s founding tenet of “valuing individuals and interactions” implies understanding, working with, and actively recalibrating emotions

Negative Spillovers Across Partnerships for Responsible Innovation: Evidence from the 2014 Ebola Outbreak

Humanity faces ongoing and contemporaneous grand challenges. Occasionally, abrupt shocks escalate a grand challenge’s salience over others. Prior research has advocated forming partnerships to address grand challenges via responsible innovation. Yet, it remains unclear how temporal changes in the salience of a grand challenge impact innovation performances of partnerships. We address this research gap by bridging the literature on issue salience, responsible innovation and interorganizational relationships. We argue that shocks either aid or harm the performance of partnerships for responsible innovation depending on whether their domains are directly or indirectly affected. The Ebola outbreak in 2014 sets the empirical context to test our theory. We find that while the innovation performance of Ebola partnerships formed after the outbreak rose eleven-fold, the performance of partnerships treating Influenza fell by 84.9 percent. Our theory and findings have immediate implications for today’s COVID-19 outbreak, cautioning against salience shifts among concurrent grand challenges

Behavioral Strategy: Strategic Consensus, Power and Networks

Organizations are embedded in a network of relationships and make sense of their business environment through the cognitive frames of their employees and executives who constantly experience battles for power. This dissertation integrates strategic management research with organizational behavior to illuminate managerial cognition, intra-organizational power and interfirm networks. The collection of the studies presented in the present dissertation provides further insights into measurement of cognition, consensus formation process, optimal power differences, and social network theory with assumptions grounded on social cognition, behavioral decision theory, psychology and organizational behavior. These studies offered a new method to measure, visualize and aggregate individual cognition to group and between group level with a strong emphasis on multiple dimensions of cognition, shed light on micro-processes on consensus formation in relation to within-group power differences and psychological safety, a novel model of strategic decision making, and a new behavioral construct that refined existing theories from a behavioral perspective. Each study on its own laid down responses to core research questions of behavioral strategy. Consequently, this dissertation extends strategic management along behavioral lines and equips scholars and practitioners with novel methods and theoretical insights with respect to cognition, power and networks

Orchestrating coordination among humanitarian organizations

Disasters mobilize hundreds of organizations, but coordination among them remains a challenge. This is why the United Nations has formed clusters to facilitate information and resource exchange among humanitarian organizations. Yet, coordination failures in prior disasters raise questions as to the effectiveness of the cluster approach in coordinating relief efforts. To better understand barriers to coordination, we developed a grounded theory and augmented the theory with an agent-based simulation. Our theory discerns a cluster lead's roles of facilitating coordination, but also investing in its own ground operations. We find that specifically serving such a dual role impairs swift trust and consequent coordination among cluster members. The additional simulation findings generalize the detrimental effect of the cluster lead's dual role versus a pure facilitator role and specify it against various boundary conditions

Do disruptive visions pay off?

Entrepreneurs often articulate a vision for their venture that purports to fundamentally change, disturb, or re-order the ways in which organizations, markets, and ecosystems operate. We call these visions disruptive visions. Neglected in both the disruption and the impression management literature, disruptive visions are widespread in business practice. We integrate real options and impression management theories to hypothesize that articulating a disruptive vision raises expectations of extraordinary returns, which in turn increases the likelihood of receiving funding, but reduces the amount of funding obtained. A novel dataset of Israeli start-ups shows that a standard deviation increase in disruptive vision communication increases the odds of receiving a first round of funding by 22 percent, but reduces amounts of funds received by 24 percent. A randomized online experiment corroborates these findings and further shows expectation of extraordinary returns as the key mechanism driving investors’ sensemaking

Heroes or Villains? Recasting Middle Management Roles, Processes, and Behaviours

Middle management ranks are once again being questioned by scholars and practitioners alike. This introduction to the special issue represents a timely reference point for consolidating, reviving, and guiding the next wave of researchers seeking to engage this debate. We review the foundations and recent advances in middle management research and develop an organizing framework in terms of middle management's organizational roles, coordination processes, and agentic behaviours. We also identify how new ways of organizing, technology, and middle manager needs are changing to shape each of these themes. The collection of works we synthesize in this introduction offer theoretical advances and empirical evidence on how these changes affect middle management roles, processes, and behaviours. We conclude by mapping out promising research avenues for future research in middle management

Temporary deembedding buyer-supplier relationships

Research on buyer-supplier relationships has debated the advantages and disadvantages of embedded relationships. We join this debate by developing theory on the performance implications of relaxing embedded buyer-supplier relationships for a limited period of time—a previously neglected phenomenon we refer to as temporary de-embedding. To capture this phenomenon’s dynamic and complex nature, we use a combined-method approach. First, we conducted a longitudinal case study of the relationship between Nissan and a strategic first-tier supplier. This case study suggests that temporary de-embedding reinvigorates search and leads to higher performance for both the buyer and supplier. Second, we built a computational simulation model using the search perspective from complexity theory to complement the theory grounded in our case study. Our simulations confirm the case findings while shedding additional light on how frequency, duration, and intensity of de-embedding affect supply chain performance

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