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There is growing evidence that managers perceive the general environment inaccurately, but very few studies have looked at the accuracy of specific strategic issue probability estimates, and at whether or not managers are aware of the accuracy or inaccuracy of their perceptions, something referred to as knowledge miscalibration. I explore perceptual inaccuracy and knowledge miscalibration in the form of overconfidence, in the context of demographic ageing, an issue currently affecting the tourism and hospitality industry. Using data from a survey of hotel managers, I find a high prevalence of perceptual error and evidence of a relatively large minority of respondents displaying knowledge overconfidence. Furthermore, I find a link between accurate environmental perceptions and strategic issue importance, suggesting that managers are better at accurately perceiving an issue when it is strategically important for their business. The same link does not exist with overconfidence, lending support to scholars arguing that overconfidence may be a trait, rather than being question-specific.

This chapter analyses the evolution of strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR). Despite extensive research on the strategic aspects of CSR, the absence of a well-defined theoretical concept has hindered the development of the field. The authors build on the four mechanisms that conceptually distinguish strategic CSR from CSR in general: enhancing firm reputation, increasing stakeholder reciprocation, mitigating firm risk, and strengthening innovation capacity. By using bibliometric methods, we analyze the main topics, references, and sources of papers, found in the Web of Science Core Collection database. The analysis of the strategic CSR field discusses main topics through three periods (1991–2009, 2010–2014, and 2015–2019). The findings help identify the mapping of conceptual space of the strategic CSR field and suggest grounds for continuing the debates on how to advance the micro-level perspectives on CSR.

This study explores how balanced scorecard format and reputation from environmental performances interact to influence performance evaluations.

Two general options exist for inserting environmental measures into a scorecard: embedded among the four traditional perspectives or grouped in a fifth perspective. Prior balanced scorecard research also assumes negative past environmental performances. In such settings, and when low management communication levels exist on the importance of environmental strategic objectives (a common practitioner scenario), environmental measures receive less decision weight when they are grouped in a fifth scorecard perspective. However, a positive environmental reputation would generate loss aversion concerns with reputation, leading to more decision weight given to environmental measures. Participants (N=138) evaluated performances with scorecards in an experimental design that manipulates scorecard format (four, five-perspectives) and past environmental performance operationalizing reputation (positive, negative).

The environmental reputation valence’s impact is more (less) pronounced when environmental measures are grouped (embedded) in a fifth perspective (among the four traditional perspectives), when the environmental feature of the measures is more (less) salient.

Findings provide the literature with original empirical results that support the popular, but often anecdotal, position of advocating a fifth perspective for environmental measures to help emphasize and promote environmental stewardship within an entity when common low management communication levels exist. Specifically, when positive past environmental performances exist, entities may choose to group environmental performance measures together in a fifth scorecard perspective without risking those measures receiving the discounted decision weight indicated in prior studies.

The role and contributions of blue and gray collar employees in strategy making in practice are generally ignored, and left out of scientific inquiry. However, the authors argue that they are “hidden actors” in the strategy making process, and “silent heroes” of the strategy. Their participative role is generally seen limited to operational phases of strategy. Nevertheless, recent literatures have fruitful implications on blue and gray collars workers’ contributions in formulation phase. Upper echelon (Hambrick, 1987; Hambrick & Mason, 1984) and strategy as practice (SAP) literatures (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009; Whittington, 2006) are suggested to be closely scrutinized since the former has incorporated the middle- and low-level teams of management in the explanation (Carpenter, Geletkancz, & Sanders, 2004), and the latter takes “practice” as a prominent research perspective, and thus enable us to approach strategy phenomena from a wider context of practitioners, practices, and praxis (Jarzabkowski, Balogun, & Seidl, 2007; Jarzabkowski & Wilson, 2002). Overall, this chapter suggests that future studies could question the hidden assumptions behind strategy approaches to trace the assumed image and role of blue and gray collars in strategy making, and go further to integrate their deserved role in strategy process, content, context, and cognition.

This paper focuses on the potential advantages of strategic investment models in examining firm investment behavior. Strategic investment models are derived from rigorous modeling techniques grounded on formal analytical models, and they have been widely applied in corporate finance and economics to examine the problem of firm underinvestment. In this paper, we present an overview of strategic investment models, including empirical applications that highlight their methodological strengths. We conclude that the empirical application of such investment models in the context of strategic management research presents research opportunities in many new directions.

Scholars working in the strategy area have long held that one of the primary ways in which organizations adapt to external changes is through strategic choice. Inasmuch as a new CEO can result in a new strategic direction for the firm, the CEO turnover event itself is an important way by which organizations can signal an alteration in the direction of the firm. In this chapter, we explore how and why CEO turnover has become one of the most powerful indicators of adaptation the firm can make and propose a research agenda to guide future work on CEO turnover.

The relationship between organization strategy and a high-involvement work system (HIWS) in the accumulation of social capital is investigated in nursing subunits in a large sample of Canadian long-term care organizations. Results suggest that strategic orientation of nursing homes has a differential impact on the ability of these organizations to accumulate social capital in its nursing staff. Using a competing values framework to characterize strategic orientation, long-term care establishments pursuing an employee-focused strategy are able to accumulate higher levels of social capital in their nursing units through the adoption of a high-involvement human resource management (HRM) work system. By contrast, long-term care organizations pursuing an operational efficiency strategy, in tandem with the adoption of a high-involvement HRM system, produce no additional accumulation in nursing unit social capital.