Search results

In our framework, we examine the influence of both reactive and proactive cognitive variables on strategic change. Reactive sources that impact strategic change are perceptions and attributions – cognitions that determine the “what” and the “why” of performance. Perceptions are first-order cognitions that assess what is the performance feedback: positive or negative? After performance feedback is perceived, attributions are second-order cognitions that attempt to establish why the performance is positive or negative.

The conclusions reached in this article are based on systematic observations of 11 organizations over a three‐year period. Examples have been selected from these observations and from secondary sources. Support for primary data collection was provided by the Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University.

Ensuring employees have a clear line‐of‐sight to strategy is one of the most effective ways to drive profitable business performance. Here, Susan Layman describes how her organization implemented a goal alignment conference and subsequent tracking system to get all employees focused on strategy.

This paper examines how a public sector organization combined management control systems (MCS) to comply with increased uncertainty and conflicting objectives of tight budget control, flexibility, and quality care simultaneously. It also analyzes how middle managers interpret management control intentions and manage conflicting objectives, and how locally developed MCS are coupled with top management goals.

This paper uses a case-study approach, based on interviews with top and middle managements, as well as document studies conducted at a medium-sized Danish municipality.

Both constraining and enabling control systems empower middle managers and facilitate tight budget controls. Furthermore, middle managers play a crucial role in the use of MCS, develop local control systems, adjust existing control systems and influence the decisions and strategies of top management.

This paper is context-specific, and the role of accounting in professional work varies due to the specific techniques involved.

This paper shows how MCS, including budgeting and planning systems, can be applied in social services to help middle managements obtain tight budget controls while also improving service quality.

This paper adds to the limited extant research on the role of middle management in a control framework and demonstrates how MCS can balance conflicting goals in social services when uncertainty increases. Furthermore, this paper shows how the vertical coupling of MCS is tight when budgeting is employed for planning purposes.

We develop an integrative conceptualization of how firms set and alter strategic goals, incorporating insights from goal-setting literatures across the disciplines of marketing, management, and psychology. Our framework accounts for the internal and external forces that impact the content of a firm's goals as well as the dynamic processes by which these goals are formed and changed over time. By proposing this framework, we strive to offer insights into the “black box” of organizational goals that connect firm resources and environmental context to firm strategies. Illustrative data to support our framework are provided from a case study of a Fortune 100 communication firm's entry into an emerging, high-technology, new product marketplace.

Consensus building plays an important role in strategy formulation and implementation. Previous researchers have attempted to find a link between goal consensus among top management and organizational performance, mainly in manufacturing settings, with varying results. Few extant studies have examined goal consensus at the functional level. Aims to expand our knowledge of the goal consensus/performance relationship by focusing on the relationship between operations and marketing in the service setting. Attempts to identify the types of co‐ordination mechanisms that help achieve functional goal consensus between operations and marketing. Finds a positive relationship between goal consensus of the marketing and operations managers and performance based on return on equity and return on assets. Concludes that consensus is correlated with the use of process and programming co‐ordination mechanisms and not correlated with the use of interpersonal co‐ordination mechanisms.

Managers today, in looking for ways to manage their staff effectively and to increase productivity, too often turn to the latest “management tool” or technique as the panacea to all their manpower problems. Attracted by glossy promises or presentations, these are introduced, generally from the top, without reference to the ever‐growing research evidence. Reviews some of the research into the use of goals in organizations. Concludes that there is research evidence to show that staff at all levels involved in setting their own goals will increase their production, quality and motivation, but that the setting of goals does not require a complex and costly process. The use of any goal is better than no goal but outcomes are better in simple participative systems.

The rapid, yet low-profit, expansion of the production capacity of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) represents a remarkable phenomenon. However, the motivation behind this key operational decision remains underexplored, especially concerning the prioritization of sociopolitical and financial goals in operations management. Drawing on the multiple-goal model in the behavioral theory of the firm (BTOF), the authors' study aims to examine how SOE capacity expansion is driven by performance feedback regarding the sociopolitical goal of employment provision and how SOEs differently prioritize sociopolitical and financial goals based on negative versus positive feedback on the sociopolitical goal.

The authors' study uses panel data on 826 Chinese SOEs in manufacturing industries from 2011 to 2019. The authors employ the fixed-effects model with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, which are robust to heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation and cross-sectional dependence.

The authors find that SOEs increase capacity expansion as sociopolitical feedback becomes more negative, but they may not increase capacity expansion in response to positive sociopolitical feedback. Moreover, negative profitability feedback strengthens SOEs' capacity expansion in response to negative sociopolitical feedback. In contrast, negative profitability feedback weakens their response to positive sociopolitical feedback.

The authors' study offers a novel behavioral explanation of SOEs' operational decisions regarding capacity expansion. While the literature has traditionally assumed multiple goals as either hierarchical or compatible, the authors extend the BTOF's multiple-goal model to illuminate when firms pursue sociopolitical and financial goals as compatible (i.e. the activation rule) versus hierarchical (i.e. the sequential rule), thereby reconciling their tension in distinct performance situations. Practically, the authors provide fine-grained insights into how operations managers can prioritize multiple goals when making operational decisions. The authors' study also shows how policymakers can influence SOE operations to pursue sociopolitical goals for public benefit.

If strategic planning systems have failed it is because managers have failed to adapt them to the changed contexts of their businesses. Four distinct contexts are identified: Pioneer, Expand, Reorient, and Dominate. These labels are chosen to indicate the primary challenge for the business unit in each of these contexts. The contexts vary in their risk and in the adaptation and/or integration orientation that they demand of the strategic planning system. Four key elements of the strategic planning system: direction of goal setting, time‐spending patterns in planning, the relative importance of the strategic budget, and the linkage between the financial plan and the budgets, are identified. Each can be manipulated to adapt the system to suit the firm′s business context.

Examines the associations between ten integrated quality management constructs and the resulting product quality. Analyzes responses from plant managers of 449 auto‐parts firms using stepwise regression. Notes three primary predictors (customer focus, empowerment, and supplier quality management) explaining 26 per cent of variation in product quality. Examines the role of top management commitment in TQM implementation by splitting the sample into firms with high and low top management commitment based on the mean score on this construct. Concludes, first, that firms with high top management commitment produce high quality products despite variations in individual constructs, and, second, that in firms with low top management commitment, four other constructs, i.e. customer focus, supplier quality management, empowerment, and internal quality information usage are primary predictors of product quality.