For the Love of Change: How Strategic Leaders Design Organizational Processes to Shape Dynamic Capabilities

Abstract

Strategy scholars have theorized that a firm's strategic leaders play an important role in firm dynamic capabilities (DCs). However, little research to date has studied how leaders shape the development of DCs. This inductive theory-building study sheds new light on the multilevel architecture of DCs by uncovering that the three core DCs – sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring – operate through distinct individual, group, and organizational processes. Further, the role of strategic leadership is critical as organizational processes create DCs only when they are purposefully designed by firms' strategic leaders to enable change and opportunity pursuit. Whether strategic leaders design processes for change and opportunity pursuit, in turn, reflects the extent to which they view change as positive and desirable. Our insights about the role of strategic leaders' positive attitude toward change as an important aspect of firm DCs uncover new interconnections between strategic leadership, organizational design, and the micro-foundations of DCs. Collectively our findings about the role of positive attitude toward change, the purposeful design of processes for change, and the varying manifestations of these processes at different levels of analysis reveal the coupling of strategic and organizational processes in enabling strategic dynamism and change.

Citation

Rindova, V.P. and Petkova, A.P. (2023), "For the Love of Change: How Strategic Leaders Design Organizational Processes to Shape Dynamic Capabilities", Di Stefano, G. and Wezel, F.C. (Ed.) Organization Theory Meets Strategy (Advances in Strategic Management, Vol. 43), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 235-274. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0742-332220230000043010