Search results

The assessment of the success of Performance Management Systems (PMS) is difficult because there are many success factors, they are mutually dependent on each other, and located at different hierarchical levels of an organization. Therefore, there is a need to describe the complete logical chain, which makes PMS successful for an organization and to find out a comprehensive list of key factors (KF) affecting the success of PMS. The objective of this research paper is to develop a method to assess success of a PMS based on a logical chain of 14 KF.

The research first develops a logical chain based on the 14 KFs on the basis of prior studies and then carries out a survey about these KFs (15 check points) of PMS and their connection to organizational performance for a small sample of firms from two EU countries.

There are next findings of this study which indicate following: KFs of PMS affect organizational performance; successful PMS improves organizational performance; PMS is successful for the organization when the completeness of the logical chain in PMS is high.

The practical contribution of this study is that findings show that firms can assess their own PMSs and compare their check point values against the values of successful PMS group. This kind of analysis indicates directly improvement potential for the different check points in PMS.

Why is it that highly trained and seasoned executives fail? On the surface, this doesn’t make sense because they are very successful; yet research in the organization sciences provides no shortage of evidence to prove just that. From the classic Mann Gulch fire disaster of Weick’s famous collapse of sensemaking study, to studies of myopia of learning, escalation of commitment, threat-rigidity, dominant logic, the architecture of simplicity, the Icarus Paradox, to core competencies turning into core rigidities, and navigating new competitive markets using “old” cognitive maps, and many more such examples point to a ubiquitous phenomenon where highly trained and experienced professionals find themselves “stuck” in the heat of battle, unable to move and progress. On the one hand, for some, there is a desperate need for change, but are unable to do so, due to their trained incapacities. On the other hand, some simply cannot see the need for change, and continue with their “business as usual” mentality. For both, their visions of the world shrink, they have a tendency to cling onto their past habitual practices and oversimplify the complexity of the situation. In moments like these: DROP YOUR TOOLS and UNLEARN! This book chapter introduces a framework (grounded in clinical psychology) that has had consistent success in helping seasoned executives and key decision-makers open up the alternatives whenever they find themselves stuck with complexity.

Artifacts are rarely used today to visualize thoughts, insights, and ideas in strategy work. Rather, textual and verbal communication dominates. This is despite artifacts and visual representations holding many advantages as tools to create and make sense of strategy in teamwork. To advance our understanding of the benefits of visual aids in strategy work, I synthesize insights from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and management research. My analysis exposes distinct neurocognitive advantages concerning attention, emotion, learning, memory, intuition, and creativity from visual sense-building. These advantages increase when sense-building activities are playful and storytelling is used.

Scenarios are cognitive aids for thinking about the future in a sustained and disciplined manner. Because scenarios must be facilitated, scenarios must be considered in the context of their practice. In the strategic management literature, there has been a considerable conversation on the practical difference between “hot” and “cold” cognition. Thinking in this conventional literature demonstrates how the facilitators of scenario planning workshops establish and channel the productive cognition of their clients away from hot cognition and toward cold cognition. But how? As a thought experiment, we examine whether the sociological concept of “emotional labor” helps explain the cognition management of clients by facilitators during scenario planning. We end by considering how a deeper practical understanding of emotional labor might help facilitators identify mechanisms and adapt their tools to better manage the cognitive-affective dimensions of scenario planning in practice.

Business model innovation (BMI) constitutes a priority for managers across industries, but it represents a notoriously difficult innovation, with several challenges, many of which are cognitive in nature. The received literature has variously suggested that one way to overcome challenges to BMI, including cognitive ones, and support the cognitive tasks is using visual representations. Against this background, we aim at offering a contribution to the emerging line of inquiry at the nexus between business models (BMs), cognition and visual representations. Specifically, we develop a new method for visual representation of the BM in support of simplification of the cognitive effort and neutralisation of cognitive barriers. The resulting representation – a network-based representation, anchored on the activity-system perspective and offering complementarity and centrality/periphery measures – allows to visually represent an existing BM as a network (nodes and linkages) of interdependent activities and to express information related to the degree of centrality/periphery of single activities (nodes) with respect to the rest of a BM configuration. This information, we argue, is potentially very valuable in supporting the cognitive tasks involved in business model reconfiguration (BMR). We guide the reader to progressively appreciate how the development of the proposed method for visual representation is anchored to two main characteristics of BMR, namely the discovery-driven nature of BMR and the path-dependent nature of BMR. We offer initial insights on the cognitive value of such a type of representation in relationship to the simplification of the cognitive effort and the neutralisation of cognitive barriers in BMR.

In this chapter, we reflect on cognitive aids and their role in strategy work. Strategy research and practice abound with frameworks, models, tools, and processes meant to describe and guide the strategy work of managers. These are all examples of cognitive aids. These aids guide and support managerial cognition, the way managers make sense of the world. What we collectively call the cognitive aids of strategy have a profound impact on the way managers learn about, conceptualize, share, and enact strategy work and strategies in their organizations. Despite the importance of their cognitive role, many cognitive aids in strategy are presented without reference to the underlying cognitive theory that explains why and how the aid might be useful. Tools are presented as useful for management thinking, but without any substantive reflection or exploration of the cognitive reasons. In this chapter, we provide a definition of cognitive aids in strategy and begin exploring the landscape of cognitive theories that can explain why something might be a cognitive aid. We then briefly outline the contributions to the edited volume “Cognitive Aids in Strategy,” and end with an invitation to expand your exploration beyond.

In an era of polycrisis, we argue that responsible leaders need to unlearn common thinking patterns imprinted by old (management) paradigms in order to find new solutions to the grand challenges of our time. To be able to overcome the “crisis of the imagination” and spur narratives about more sustainable futures, leaders need to update and restructure their skill sets and invest in developing anticipatory and futures (thinking) skills, as well as futures literacy as a competence. To achieve this on the student level, we also need to rethink business and management education at the university level by challenging the ways we teach, i.e., teaching pedagogics, as well as the content and story we want to tell about the future of management. Thus, with this chapter, we aim to rethink pedagogical methods and tools by introducing educators to potential pathways for equipping students with adequate skills to be able to “use-the-future”. As the process of unlearning is difficult, we argue that we need to venture out of the business discipline and push the barriers of the business and management curriculum so as to be able to further unleash creativity and imagination. To achieve this aim, we propose the integration of methods and approaches from art-related disciplines, such as theater, visual arts, or design, into the business curriculum.

Visuals are a crucial part of strategizing, whether it be through the use of body gesture, the crafting of strategy presentations, or the use of new media technologies from videoconferencing through to data visualization. Yet studying these aspects of the strategy process is methodologically challenging and requires careful attention to how the data is collected and what questions the data analysis can address. In this chapter, we lay out choices for scholars and the opportunities these afford to new and promising agendas in strategy and management research.