Search results

This book on uncertainty comprises the initial volume in a series titled “New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition”. We asked Frances Milliken and Gerard P. Hodgkinson, two well-known scholars who have made important contributions to our understanding of uncertainty to join us in this opening chapter to introduce this project. The brief bios found at the end of this volume cannot do justice to the broad range of their contributions, but our conversation gives a flavor of the kind of insights they have brought to managerial and organizational cognition (MOC). The editors thank them for helping launch the series with a decisive exploration of what defining uncertainty involves, how that might be done, why it is important, and how the task is changing. We were interested to discover that all five of us are currently involved in research that considers the nature and impact of uncertainty, and we hope that readers similarly find that paying attention to uncertainty contributes to their current projects. Working together, we can advance understanding of organizational settings and effective action, both for researchers and practitioners.

Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as a basis for revealing actors’ mental representations of strategic knowledge. Extant elicitation techniques were advanced during an era when cognitive scientists and organizational researchers alike were preoccupied with the basic information of processing limitations of decision makers and means of addressing them, predicated on an outmoded conception of strategists as affect-free, cognitive misers. The need to adapt these techniques to enable the investigation of the emotional content and structure of actors’ mental representations is now a pressing priority for the advancement of theory, research, and practice pertaining to several interrelated areas of strategic management, from dynamic capabilities development, to upper echelons theory, to strategic consensus formation. Accordingly, in this chapter, we report the findings of two studies that investigated the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid, a robust method, widely known and well used in strategic management, for this purpose. Study 1 elicited a series of commonly mentioned strategic issues (the elements) from a sample of senior managers similar in composition to the sample recruited to the second study. Study 2 participants evaluated the elements elicited in Study 1 in relation to a series of researcher-supplied bipolar attributes (the constructs), based on the well-known affective circumplex model of human emotions. In line with expectations, a series of vector-based multivariate analyses revealed a number of interesting similarities and variations among participants in terms of the basic structure and emotional salience of the issues under consideration.

The psychological analysis of strategic management issues has gained a great deal of momentum in recent years. Much can be learned by entering the black box of strategic thinking of senior executives and bring new insights on how they see, make sense of, and interpret their everyday strategic experiences. This chapter will focus on a powerful cognitive mapping tool called the Repertory Grid Technique and demonstrate how it has been used in the strategy literature along with how a new and more refined application of the technique can enhance the elicitation of complex strategic cognitions for strategy and Board of Directors research.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of academic research dedicated to the field of Behavioral Strategy. Based on a series of Bibliometric and network analyses, the paper identifies the prominent trend and growth patterns pertaining to the evolution of this important strategic management subfield; it documents which particular journals, articles and authors have most influenced its development, and it maps the intellectual structure and network of authors, publications and countries. Finally, the paper considers the substantive research themes emerging from the analyses reported, in terms of their implications for future work.

The authors undertook a series of Bibliometric and network analyses of 217 relevant articles, published between 1975 and 2020, in journals listed in the Scopus database, using R-studio and VOSviewer. Articles incorporated in the study were selected based on relevant key terms searched from the title, abstract and list of keywords associated with each publication.

The results demonstrate that behavioral strategy has enjoyed robust and sustained growth, with widespread impact across many areas of the heterogeneous business and management field as a whole. Three distinct periods are identified: an infancy stage (prior to 1999); a steady growth stage (1999–2010); and a take-off stage (2011 onwards). The top three journals in terms of content coverage, based on the number of relevant articles published in relation to behavioral strategy, are Strategic Management Journal, Advances in Strategic Management (AiSM) and the Journal of Management, while the top three most influential journals, in terms of citations pertaining to Behavioral Strategy, based on an analysis of citations in the Scopus database, are Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Perspectives and Journal of Management Studies. Gerard P. Hodgkinson and Thomas C. Powell are the most prolific authors. The emerging themes based on intellectual structures have been identified as Behavioral Strategy, Behavioral Theory of Firm; Strategic Leadership and Dynamic Capabilities; and Strategic Cognition and Decision Making.

The study contributes to knowledge advancement concerning Behavioral Strategy by opening new possibilities to discover important research areas.

The study is the first of its kind on Behavioral Strategy providing a comprehensive systematic literature review.

Current conceptualisations of strategic flexibility and its antecedents are theory‐driven, which has resulted in a lack of consensus. To summarise this domain the paper aims to develop and present an a priori conceptual model of the antecedents and outcomes of strategic flexibility. Discussion and insights into the conceptual model, and the relationships specified, are made through a novel qualitative empirical approach. The implications for further research and a framework for further theoretical development are presented.

An exploratory qualitative research design is used applying multiple data collection techniques in a branch network of a large regional retailer in the UK. The development of strategic options and the complex relationship to strategic flexibility is investigated.

The number and type of strategic options developed by managers impact on the degree of strategic flexibility and also on the ability of the firm to achieve competitive differentiation. Additionally, the type of strategic option implemented by managers is dependent on the competitive situation faced at a local level. Evidence of managers' limited perception of competition was identified based on their spatial embeddedness.

A single, in‐depth case study was used. The data gathered is rich and appropriate for the exploratory approach adopted here. However, generalisability of the findings is limited.

Strategic flexibility is rooted in the ability of front‐line mangers to develop and implement strategic options; this in turn facilitates competitive differentiation.

The research presented is unique in this domain on two accounts. First, theory is developed by presenting an a priori conceptual model, and testing through in‐depth qualitative data gathering. Second, insights into strategic flexibility are presented through an examination of managerial cognition, resources and strategic option generation using cognitive mapping and laddering technique.

The major part of studies in the field of strategic cognition focussed on strategy content, while process studies are comparatively rare. Those of the studies that are dedicated to explain strategy occurrence are dominantly restricted to formal decision making. In contrast to this, the purpose of this paper is to draw on a framework that helps to get a differentiated picture on contingent processes, strategies may pass through in organizations. Furthermore, an own elicitation procedure is introduced that enables to measure strategic cognition on different levels.

The paper provides an empirical approach by applying collective causal mapping techniques, both on an individual as well as collective level. The conceptual framework of the study rests on the “genesis” concept of strategy formation introduced by Kirsch and colleagues.

The main contribution of the paper is the presentation of a methodical approach to study the formation of shared strategic orientations in small companies. An operationalization to study these cognitive processes, based on collective causal mapping techniques is provided.

Applying the methodical approach presented in the paper is expected to make a contribution to the understanding of the shared knowledge of organizational members about major strengths and weaknesses of a new strategic reorientation and to contribute to practical concerns of organizational members in specific problematic situations, especially in small companies.

The study empirically approaches the complex phenomenon on strategy formation in small companies and therefore expands the understanding of shared cognition in organizations.

There is a research gap in strategic management regarding the complement from managerial cognition literature to the behavioral theory of firm, as well as linkage between cognitive structure and cognitive process of strategy formulation in the field of managerial cognition, which also calls for further exploration. The purpose of this paper is to construct a model from an integrated view for explaining the process of cognitive reconstruction under incremental changes.

Qualitative research is conducted in the form of 17 semi-structured interviews in four hidden champions operating in China. Based on the model generated from the literature review, this paper adopts the abductive logic for data analysis.

This paper draws the following conclusions. The cognitive structure is shaped by the changing environment and the performance feedback, the variance in structural attributes will affect whether the changing environment destructs the effectiveness of original cognitive structure or not, the centrality of cognitive structure will promote the efficiency of tried-and-true organizational adaptations to incremental changes, and cognitive structure reconstruction is the result of the recursive process of trial-and-error learning.

This paper proposes the model explaining the interaction mechanisms between cognitive structure and strategy formulation process. It also presents the iterative sense-making process for reconstructing cognitive structure in strategy formulation. Both of them extend the understanding on managerial cognition in organizational adaptations to incremental environmental changes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of cognitive diversity on strategic issue interpretation among the boards of directors making sense of sustainability management. The study also investigated the centrality of the corporate sustainability issues to identify common interpretative patterns in the shared cognitive maps among the companies. In addition, the aim was to advance quantitative methods for the analysis of decision-makers’ cognition.

The research was an exploratory study analyzing 43 individual cognitive maps collected through surveys from the boards of nine cleantech companies. For the elicitation of the cognitive maps, the study used the hybrid cognitive mapping technique. The diversity of the shared cognitive maps was analyzed using the distance ratio formula and the graph analysis method with eigenvector to measure the centrality of the strategic issue interpretation in the maps.

This study provides evidence through the analysis of distance ratios on the existence of cognitive diversity among companies within the same industry. Surprisingly, despite the cognitive diversity, the study identified strong common patterns on strategic issue interpretations among the companies. In addition, the study shows that the sustainability management issues have gained minor attention from the boards of directors.

The initial industry sample provided relatively restricted perspectives on managerial cognition, and to confirm the findings regarding the effects of industry on the shared cognitive maps of top decision-makers, wider industry-level data are needed.

This study provides an approach to facilitate the process of strategic decision-making for top decision-makers by identifying the shared beliefs of the selected strategic theme and to concentrate on the most central strategic issues in the company and industry. It reveals asymmetry between the significance of sustainability issues in an open agenda and the real position of sustainability concepts in the shared cognitive maps in the green industry. Also, the study advances cognitive mapping techniques for application in the board’s decision-making.

This paper contributes to brightening the black box of corporate governance by shedding light on the interaction of the concepts of corporate sustainability and other key strategic issues within the shared cognitive maps of the boards. It also provides new empirical knowledge on top decision-making processes and the effects of cognitive diversity on the strategic issue interpretations within the corporate boards of the green industry, and it further develops the methodology for the quantification of cognitive diversity and the content of cognitive maps.

Behavioral strategy, as a cognitive- and social-psychological view on strategic management, has gained increased attention. However, its conceptualization is still fuzzy and deserves an in-depth investigation. The authors aim to provide a holistic overview and classification of previous research and identify gaps to be addressed in future research.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review on behavioral strategy. The final sample includes 46 articles from leading management journals, based on which the authors develop a research framework.

The results reveal cognition and traits as major internal factors. Besides, organizational and environmental contingencies are major external factors of behavioral strategy.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first holistic systematic literature review on behavioral strategy, which categorizes previous research.

The aim of this special issue is to better understand the strategy and change interface, in particular, the (sub)processes and cognitions that enable strategies to be successfully implemented and organizations effectively changed. The ten papers selected for this special issue reflect a range of scholarly traditions and, thus, as our review and integration of the relevant literatures, and our introductions to the ten papers demonstrate, they shed light on the strategy and change interface in starkly different ways. Collectively, the papers give us more insight into the recursive activities, and structural, organizational learning and cognitive mechanisms that are encouraged or deliberately established at organizations to allow their people to successfully implement a strategy and effect change, including achieve greater levels of horizontal alignment. Moreover, they demonstrate the benefits associated with establishing platforms and/or routines designed to overcome decision-makers’ cognitive shortcomings while implementing a strategy or making timely adjustments to it. We conclude our editorial by identifying some yet unanswered questions.