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The purpose of this paper is to discuss how enterprises can effectively perceive and use the digital opportunities brought about by digital technologies and dynamic environments and how they can enhance their capabilities to realize digital transformation and adapt to the development of the digital economy era.

Based on the windows of opportunity theory and strategic cognition theory, this paper conducts an empirical analysis of the questionnaire data of 268 enterprises and discusses the influence of external windows of opportunity and internal windows of opportunity on the digital transformation of enterprises, as well as the action mechanism of strategic cognition and entrepreneurship.

The results show that both the external windows of opportunity and the internal windows of opportunity have significant positive effects on the digital transformation of enterprises. Strategic cognition plays a partial mediating role in the external windows of opportunity and the internal windows of opportunity influencing the enterprise digital transformation process. Entrepreneurship plays a positive regulatory role in the process of external windows of opportunity and internal windows of opportunity influencing strategic cognition.

This paper deepens the relationship between internal and external windows of opportunity and enterprise digital transformation and contributes a new theoretical cognition. This paper integrates the strategic cognition theory to clarify the complex process mechanism of digital transformation using external situational opportunities and internal capabilities. This paper introduces entrepreneurship into the path mechanism of digital transformation and expands the characteristics of the study of digital transformation antecedents to the individual level within the enterprise.

Strategy scholars have theorized that a firm's strategic leaders play an important role in firm dynamic capabilities (DCs). However, little research to date has studied how leaders shape the development of DCs. This inductive theory-building study sheds new light on the multilevel architecture of DCs by uncovering that the three core DCs – sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring – operate through distinct individual, group, and organizational processes. Further, the role of strategic leadership is critical as organizational processes create DCs only when they are purposefully designed by firms' strategic leaders to enable change and opportunity pursuit. Whether strategic leaders design processes for change and opportunity pursuit, in turn, reflects the extent to which they view change as positive and desirable. Our insights about the role of strategic leaders' positive attitude toward change as an important aspect of firm DCs uncover new interconnections between strategic leadership, organizational design, and the micro-foundations of DCs. Collectively our findings about the role of positive attitude toward change, the purposeful design of processes for change, and the varying manifestations of these processes at different levels of analysis reveal the coupling of strategic and organizational processes in enabling strategic dynamism and change.

Practitioners and academics are starting to recognize the benefits of green IT/IS practices. Despite these benefits, this study aims to know more regarding the factors that would drive organizations to use green IT/IS practices within their IT function and across the enterprise. To further understanding in this area, this study applies a strategic cognition framework of firm responsiveness and institutional theory to determine the extent to which an organization uses green IT/IS practices in response to stakeholder concerns. This study investigates the extent to which two organizational logics – expressive and instrumental – and three institutional pressures – coercive, mimetic and normative – jointly affect an organization's use of both green IT practices and green IS practices.

This study tested the hypotheses with survey data collected from 306 organizations. Structural equation modeling was used for data analysis.

Findings support four joint effects: (1) individualistic identity orientation and coercive pressure positively affect green IT practices; (2) collectivistic identity orientation and normative pressure positively influence green IS practices; (3) cost reduction orientation and mimetic pressure positively affect green IT practices; and (4) revenue expansion orientation and normative pressure positively influence green IS practices.

This study contributes to the literature by providing evidence for joint drivers of green IT and green IS practices. Green IT and IS practices represent organizations' different levels of commitment to environmental sustainability and responsiveness to stakeholders (i.e. green IT/IS practices). Organizations of different expressive and instrumental orientations are attuned to institutional pressures to various degrees, which leads to different green IT/IS practices.

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.

The dynamism of competition in international markets requires managers to react accordingly and ensure the firm's survival and competitiveness. This study examines the impact of cognitive styles and dynamic managerial capabilities (DMC) on a firm's international performance and the mediating role of these capabilities in the relationship between cognitive styles and international performance.

This study adopts a quantitative cross-sectional research design, employing a sample of 306 firm owner-managers from exporting companies in Kosovo.

The findings suggest that managers' cognitive styles positively influence firm international performance, including their impact on DMC. Results also indicate that only managerial cognition mediates cognitive styles' effects on a firm's international performance, compared to managers' social capital.

In this study, the authors contribute to the literature by integrating cognitive styles with DMC in a transition country. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that DMC mediate the impact of cognitive styles on the firm international performance.

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.

This study aims to explore the strategies corporations use in engaging stakeholders to sustain healthy corporate partnerships and create value for the corporate entity and the society in which they operate and their influence on the corporate manager’s cognitive abilities and decision-making.

The authors used an interpretive research approach leveraging the strengths of qualitative method of content analysis and comparative and critical analyses to report the results. Interpretive methods incorporate social theories and standpoints that view reality as the social construction of understandable events in the context of organizational communication.

The findings of this study suggest that corporations are assumed to follow and execute the principles of engaging stakeholders to achieve corporate social responsibility (CSR) claiming to manage a sustainable and responsible business practices that recognize local cultures, human rights and protect the environment. However, little attention has been paid to the cognitive reasoning of the individuals responsible for CSR and corporate sustainability (CS) as opposed to the growing concerns about strategies corporations use in engaging stakeholders to sustain healthy corporate partnerships and create value – especially the processes that take place during engagement and decision-making including cognitive offloading.

Stakeholder engagement requires practical approaches that enable corporations and individuals charged with decision-making responsibilities to understand, respond and fulfill their CSRs. To achieve CSRs, corporations and managers responsible for relevant decision-making would need to involve stakeholders in social performance planning, as social reporting/auditing has long been advocating for preventing managerial biasness, groupthink and increased information dissemination via detailed reporting practices toward more collaborative stakeholder relationships. Thus, it is crucial for corporations to implement enhanced stakeholder and managerial decision-making strategies such as integrative approaches to achieve balance in the trio elements of sustainability as well as the growing use of paradox perspective to understand the nature of the tensions being sought to balance and, in the process, provide opportunity for a better evaluation of complex sustainability issues for innovative approach to resolving them. While cognitive decision-making is at play, in practice, managers tasked with making decisions must ensure the most effective stakeholder engagement strategies that are transparent and inclusive are used.

The main contribution of this study is its argument regarding the tools corporations use in engaging key stakeholders and the cognitive reasoning of the individuals responsible for CSR and CS. The study further contributes to interpreting the integrative approach to achieving balance in the trio elements of sustainability as well as the growing use of paradox perspective to understand the nature of the tensions being sought to balance and, in the process, provide an opportunity for a better evaluation of complex sustainability issues for an innovative approach to resolving them.

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.

Despite the escalating significance and intricate nature of supply chains, there has been limited scholarly attention devoted to exploring the cognitive processes that underlie supply chain management. Drawing on cognitive-behavioral theory, the authors propose a moderated-mediation model to investigate how paradoxical leadership impacts manufacturing supply chain resilience.

By conducting a two-wave study encompassing 164 supply chain managers from Chinese manufacturing firms, the authors employ partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to empirically examine and validate the proposed hypotheses.

The findings indicate that managers' paradoxical cognition significantly affects supply chain resilience, with supply chain ambidexterity acting as a mediating mechanism. Surprisingly, the study findings suggest that big data analytics negatively moderate the effect of paradoxical cognition on supply chain ambidexterity and supply chain resilience, while positively moderating the effect of supply chain ambidexterity on supply chain resilience.

These findings shed light on the importance of considering cognitive factors and the potential role of big data analytics in enhancing manufacturing supply chain resilience, which enriches the study of behavioral operations.

The results offer managerial guidance for leaders to use paradoxical cognition frames and big data analytics properly, offering theoretical insight for future research in manufacturing supply chain resilience.

This is the first empirical research examining the impact of paradoxical leadership on supply chain resilience by considering the role of big data analytics and supply chain ambidexterity.

This study explores how a small minority of social entrepreneurs break free from third sector constraints to conceive, create and grow non-profit organisations that generate social value at scale in new and innovative ways.

Six narrative case histories of innovative social enterprises were developed based on documents and semi-structured interviews with founders and long serving executives. Data were coded “chrono-processually”, which involves locating thoughts, events and actions in distinct time periods (temporal bracketing) and identifying the processes at work in establishing new social ventures.

This study presents two core findings. First, the paper demonstrates how successful social entrepreneurs draw on their lived experiences, private and professional, in driving the development and implementation of social innovations, which are realised through application of their capabilities as analysts, strategists and resources mobilisers. These capabilities are bolstered by personal legitimacy and by their abilities as storytellers and rhetoricians. Second, the study unravels the complex processes of social entrepreneurship by revealing how sensemaking, theorising, strategizing and sensegiving underpin the core processes of problem specification, the formulation of theories of change, development of new business models and the implementation of social innovations.

The study demonstrates how social entrepreneurs use sensemaking and sensegiving strategies to understand and address complex social problems, revealing how successful social entrepreneurs devise and disseminate social innovations that substantially add value to society and bring about beneficial social change. A novel process-outcome model of social innovation is presented illustrating the interconnections between entrepreneurial cognition and strategic action.