Huber, G. P.

Administrative Science Quarterly

English

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 Sage Publications, Inc. and Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Administrative Science Quarterly.http://www.jstor.orgReview Author(s): George P. Huber Review by: George P. Huber Source:   Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. 502-504Published by:  on behalf of the Sage Publications, Inc. Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell UniversityStable URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/25426917Accessed: 05-03-2015 20:15 UTCYour use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at  http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jspJSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of contentin a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.This content downloaded from 128.83.205.78 on Thu, 05 Mar 2015 20:15:34 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsOther Reviews The Competent Organization: A Psychological Analysis of the Strategic Management Process. Gerard P. Hodgkinson and Paul R. Sparrow. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2002. 412 pp. $130.00, cloth; $43.95, paper. Let its title not mislead you. The Competent Organization is written by researchers for researchers. The authors seek to achieve two goals. One is to provide "an in-depth psychologi cal analysis of the strategic management process" (p. 2). Toward this end, they provide an overview of the "psycholo gy of strategic management," by which they mean those aspects of psychology that can be brought to bear on under standing important bases of managerial competence and, hence, some important bases of organizational competence. Their second goal is to identify and articulate directions for future psychological research. These directions are far-reach ing in scope and time; they outline a research agenda that will involve a considerable variety of psychological and organi zational science researchers and that will be relevant well into the second decade of this century. The authors state that "the central defining concepts of this book are strategic competence and managerial and organiza tional cognition" (p. 3). For researchers interested in learning about areas of psychological inquiry that might contribute to understanding managerial and organizational processes and performance, or those researchers seeking expert advice about areas of inquiry that seem especially fruitful, I recom mend this book highly. Those professionals seeking guidance to improve managerial and organizational processes and per formance should look elsewhere, however, as this book's authors are fully focused on fulfilling the two goals noted above. Organizing a description of a field of study by area of applica tion is difficult, as many of a field's concepts are germane to multiple areas. The solution, not always enacted, is to deal with the concepts wherever they are relevant, even if this creates some repetition. The authors of this book deal effec tively with this matter. That is, while the book's six content chapters map onto six areas of managerial and organization cognition, a good many of the concepts are discussed in more than one chapter. I found that this enriched my appreci ation of the concepts and of the interdependences among the areas. The trade-off in organizing the book this way is that the titles of the six content chapters underrepresent the scope of topics treated in the book. The first chapter, "The Cognitive Perspective Comes of Age," describes the focus and structure of the book and pro vides an overview of the main issues addressed by manageri al and organizational cognition researchers during the 1980s, the 1990s, and the first years of the current century. The authors argue that, to a considerable extent, the increased interest in these particular issues followed from the rapidly increasing complexity and dynamism of organizational envi ronments that characterized this period. Because these same phenomena characterize current environments, and will very 502/ASQ, September 2006 This content downloaded from 128.83.205.78 on Thu, 05 Mar 2015 20:15:34 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBook Reviews likely characterize future organizational environments as well, it is not surprising that, in a broad sense, the book deals with elaborations of these issues and often identifies how and why certain issues and probable elaborations of issues are in need of study by psychologists and other behavioral science researchers. In a faster changing environment, if an organization is to sur vive, it?or at least some of its key members?will have to learn faster than did the organizations that preceded it. Chap ter 2, the first content chapter, is "Organizational Learning." The research topics covered range from tacit learning to com munities of practice to competency traps. Closely associated with organizational learning are the major topics examined in chapter 3, "Distributed Cognition, Organizational Memory and Knowledge Management." The topics here range from distributed cognition in groups to knowledge management to information overload. The topics of these two chapters could be grouped into one chapter, but the resultant content would be less easily absorbed. Chunking has its virtues. Chapter 4, "Competition and Cognition," focuses on two very specific, related topics: the mental models and process es managers use when (1) analyzing the structure of busi ness competition and (2) choosing strategies for dealing with the competition. But these topics are used as issues around which to organize the authors' examination of a variety of cognitive and social-psychological topics germane to manage rial information processing and decision making. Included in the chapter are treatments of categorization, cognitive inertia, situated learning, and individual and group mental models. Much of this chapter concentrates on empirical findings and methodological critiques of empirical work. Chapter 5, "Strategic Cognition in Top Management Teams," deals with and elaborates on some of the topics of chapter 4 and other, related topics as well. A subject on which these topics are brought to bear is the upper echelons perspective, the idea that much can be predicted about managers' information pro cessing by using their demographic characteristics as proxies for their values and beliefs and that the values and beliefs of an organization's dominant coalition are primary determinants of its strategic choices. As elsewhere in the book, the authors present and examine findings in this chapter that challenge conventional beliefs, such as the following: (1) cog nitive diversity in top management teams inhibits rather than promotes the comprehensiveness of decisions and inhibits extensive long-range planning, and (2) decision-specific char acteristics have more influence on decision processes than do contextual factors or management's characteristics. It is unusual to find a scholarly treatment of managerial com petencies and individual-level factors, the subject matter of chapter 6, that includes not only traditional topics, such as the need for achievement and individual differences in infor mation processing, but also topics outside the mainstream, such as intuitive insight, intuitive decision making, creative cognition, and emotional intelligence. The authors' objective treatment of these latter topics is thought provoking. 503/ASQ, September 2006 This content downloaded from 128.83.205.78 on Thu, 05 Mar 2015 20:15:34 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsThe authors are well grounded in the subject matter of chap ter 7, "Knowledge Elicitation Techniques and Methods for Intervention." So, while the chapter usefully describes the state of knowledge with respect to several techniques for assessing managerial knowledge and understanding, what I found especially interesting were the authors' views on how methodological progress in these areas can advance the field of managerial and organizational cognition. This chapter is a good lead-in to the last chapter, "Conclusions and Future Directions." In this last chapter, the authors spell out how progress in theory development in several of the specific top ics covered earlier, and in some related areas not treated in depth in the book or elsewhere, could lead to improvements in managerial practices and performance. In aggregate, and without structuring the set of topics treated, the chapter sets out a long-range research agenda for psychologists and other behavioral scientists interested in managerial and organiza tional cognition. I found this material interesting and motivat ing. Though it is clearly a matter of preference, my own pref erence would have been to bring some of this material forward into the previous chapters. This book can add to nearly anyone's understanding of the scope of managerial and organizational cognition and of what we know about the psychology of strategic management. Further, any reader will find new insights about needed research to advance theory or methodology in these areas. George P. Huber McCombs School of Business University of Texas at Austin 1 University Station, B6300 Austin, TX 78712-0210 504/ASQ, September 2006 This content downloaded from 128.83.205.78 on Thu, 05 Mar 2015 20:15:34 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Competent Organization: A Psychological Analysis Of The Strategic Management Process

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The Competent Organization: A Psychological Analysis Of The Strategic Management Process

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