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Strategic adaptation in complex environments with frequent changes must balance the search for innovative opportunistic ventures and conscious pursuit to achieve established goals and outcomes. This creates a tension between attempted efficiency gains from tight strategic controls that avoid diversion of corporate resources and the facilitation of dispersed initiatives in search for business opportunities. To assess this conundrum, the authors present an interactive strategic control model that combines planning and participative strategy-making with interactive control processes. This combination of management practices arguably creates an adaptive system that drives the upside performance outcomes from a guided adaptation of opportunistic insights. Various hypotheses are developed and tested based on survey data from among the 500 largest firms in Denmark. The results suggest a direct relationship between interactive controls, strategic planning, and participative leadership on upside performance outcomes. Moreover, the positive effect from interactive controls on the upside potential is enhanced by participative decisions.

The dual importance of centrally induced strategic intent and the ability to engage in autonomous strategic initiatives has been demonstrated in both qualitative and quantitative empirical studies over the past decades. However, the particular mechanisms required to facilitate the interaction between these strategy-making approaches and achieve better corporate performance are less clear. The authors argue that the commonly conceived but rarely examined role of the strategic control process is essential to the implied adaptive performance dynamic. Although the strategic control typically is conceived as the diagnostic monitoring of outcomes, the authors contend that an interactive control (IC) mechanism is conducive to superior performance outcomes. To examine this, the authors use the extant strategy literature to generate the basic hypothesized relationships and conduct an empirical study based on a large corporate sample to uncover the intricate strategy-making model. The analyses show that adherence to ICs is an essential mediator for the positive combined effects of strategic planning and autonomous strategy-making processes.

The combined roles of strategic planning and decentralized strategy-making remain an essential issue in strategy research and its resolution has implications for management practice. To this end the current study considers the added effects of adopted leadership style and use of interactive controls and thereby uncovers new interesting insights about the combined strategy-making process. The authors use structural equation analyses to investigate these more fine-grained relationships based on an updated cross-sectional dataset from among the largest companies in Denmark. The analyses find that a participative leadership style drives the application of interactive controls, which in turn has a positive interaction effect on the relationship between strategic planning and corporate performance. A participative leadership style also exerts positive influence on autonomous strategic actions, which in turn has a negative direct relationship to performance, but a positive interaction effect on performance together with use of interactive controls. The authors discuss the theoretical foundation for these intricate relationships and consider opportunities to extract further research insights.

This paper builds on a long-lasting research program on the micro-foundations of innovative decision making, founded on a development of a neglected epistemic aspect of Simon's work, and on contributions in epistemology, in which heuristics are not procedures that are uncertaintyavoiding, economizing on cognitive and search effort, and problem-space reducing, but procedures that are uncertainty-modeling, investing in research effort, and problem-expanding. The paper offers a summary of the main effective heuristics of that kind so far identified, as applied to real processes of innovative decision making under epistemic uncertainty, such as judging and investing in novel entrepreneurial projects. It argues and shows that, in contrast to the common view, a wide range of those procedures, usually thought to belong to different and rival models, can be fruitfully combined.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of having a patient-designated caregiver remain overnight with ambulatory extended recovery patients on early postoperative clinical outcomes.

This was a retrospective cohort study of patients undergoing surgery requiring overnight stay in a highly resourced free-standing oncology ambulatory surgery center. Postoperative outcomes in patients who had caregivers stay with them overnight were compared with outcomes in those who did not. All other care was standardized. Primary outcomes were postoperative length of stay, hospital readmission rates, urgent care center (UCC) visits within 30 days and perioperative complication rates.

Among patients staying overnight, 2,462 (57 percent) were accompanied by overnight caregivers. In this group, time to discharge was significantly lower. Readmissions (though rare) were slightly higher, though the difference was not statistically significant (p=0.059). No difference in early (<30 day) complications or UCC visits was noted. Presence of a caregiver overnight was not associated with important differences in outcomes, though further research in a less well-structured environment is likely to show a more robust benefit. Caregivers are still recommended to stay overnight if that is their preference as no harm was identified.

This study is unique in its evaluation of the clinical impact of having a caregiver stay overnight with ambulatory surgery patients. Little research has focused on the direct impact of the caregiver on patient outcomes, especially in the ambulatory setting. With increased adoption of minimally invasive surgical techniques and enhanced recovery pathways, a larger number of patients are eligible for short-stay ambulatory surgery. Factors that impact discharge and early postoperative complications are important.

The unavailability of practitioners is one of the disturbing realities that often prevent the use of experimental methods in accounting research. The availability of pragmatic alternatives to accounting practitioners demands that researchers explore such alternatives fully before conducting expensive experiments with practitioners. However, the use of students as surrogates for non‐students has been a controversial issue and this has led to an under‐utilization of the experimental method in management accounting research. Recent research has warned that relying solely on practitioners as subjects in experimental methods may result in “negative externalities”. The purpose of this paper is to inquire in to the feasibility of using student subjects in behavioral accounting research so that better judgments can be made about the benefits and dangers of using students in experiments.

The paper relies on a review and synthesis of the literature on the student surrogate debate.

The paper shows that accounting students may be adequate surrogates for practitioners in many decision‐making experiments.

The paper demonstrates that maintaining the experimental realism of a study and replications are more important than the type of subject when generalizing results.

The paper provides an analysis and synthesis of literature that will enable researchers to make sound judgments about the selection of subjects for experiments.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the question of whether there is an optimal level of time pressure in groups.

Design/approach – We argue that distinguishing performance from productivity is a necessary step toward the eventual goal of being able to determine optimal deadlines and ideal durations of meetings. We review evidence of time pressure's differential effects on performance and productivity.

Findings – Based on our survey of the literature, we find that time pressure generally impairs performance because it places constraints on the capacity for thought and action that limit exploration and increase reliance on well-learned or heuristic strategies. Thus, time pressure increases speed at the expense of quality. However, performance is different from productivity. Giving people more time is not always better for productivity because time spent on a task yields decreasing marginal returns to performance.

Originality/value of chapter – The evidence reviewed here suggests that setting deadlines wisely can help maximize productivity.

This empirical study examined links between entrepreneurial personality traits and perception of new venture opportunity in a sample of 207 respondents. Four entrepreneurial personality traits were included to predict respondents℉ perception of new venture opportunity. They are (1) achievement motivation, (2) locus of control, (3) risk propensity, and (4) proactivity.The results of multiple regression analysis show that three of the four entrepreneurial personality traits‐locus of control, risk propensity, and proactivity‐related significantly to perception of new venture opportunity in expected directions. Among the three personality traits, proactivity was found to have the strongest influence over entrepreneurial perception. No significant relationship was found between achievement motivation and perception of new venture opportunity. Among six control variables, only work experience was found to influence perception of new venture opportunity. This study explored links between entrepreneurial personalities and cognition and its results suggest that a combination of trait and cognition approaches contributes to a better understanding of entrepreneurial decision-making process. Both theoretical and practical implications were discussed.