Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Shifts in consumer behavior, dislocations in production factors, and changes of the social environment — organizations face a changing world. To ensure survival and performance, organizations need to frequently reconsider and revise their strategies. Why some organizations fail to keep up with their environment and how organizations can improve their strategic responsiveness are core questions of many behavioral and cognitive research contributions.

For a long time strategy research has grounded its theories on the assumptions of traditional economic theories. They have based their research and recommendations on the assumptions that managers observe an objective environment and make rational decisions, at least in the context of their own utility optimization. In the light of these assumptions, their work has focused on developing concepts and recommendations for managers on what strategic actions they should take and analyzed the impact of these decisions on firm performance. Thus, strategy research has addressed the question “ what shall managers decide?”. However, their work has widely ignored the question “ how do managers decide?”.

Thomas/Shankster/Mathieu argue that, although research on strategic sensemaking is expanding, still little is known about the effects of the top management team context on the way they make strategic decisions. The following research review discusses empirical cognitive studies that link the environmental and organizational context of teams (chapter 1), and top management team composition (chapter 2) to the team's strategic sensemaking, strategic decisions, and performance.^120

This study aims at identifying and exploring patterns between the composition of top management teams and their strategic sensemaking. Due to the explorative nature of the research question, and the objective to study the phenomenon of top management team sensemaking in its natural setting, the empirical part of this study is based on a multiple-case study design.^239 The ten cases were chosen according to theoretical replication logic: the researchers started with surveying and interviewing the first team, analyzed the case to establish first propositions, and then collected data from the next team to check and further develop the propositions. When feeling comfortable with the patterns, the researchers started to vary the organizational size, ownership situation, and involvement of the owner in the management of the organization to analyze how these organizational factors might change the propositions. Two researchers collected data from each team member of the selected teams. They collected data by means of questionnaires and interviews. The questionnaires contained questions about the demographic and personality background of each team member as well as about the team culture and the team’s sensemaking. The strategic sensemaking of the team was further studied by interviewing each team member. To determine the number of cases, the researchers used theoretical sampling. The researchers stopped collecting data as soon as the emerging theoretical model became sound and the incremental learnings from additional cases diminished.^240

Chapter 1 describes the within-case analysis of each top management team. The study develops a team composition profile for each team and a profile of each team’s sensemaking. Both are based on the quantitative and qualitative data of the questionnaires the interviews. The following chapter 2 presents the findings of the cross-case analysis.

To understand why teams in comparable environments design their sensemaking differently, this study investigated how the composition of top management teams affects the agenda-setting, generation of strategic alternatives, and the decision-making speed of teams. The results of this study generally support the findings of earlier contributions suggesting that top management team composition matters and has a significant impact on how teams design their sensemaking. The interview partners refer to different aspects of the team composition quite frequently when discussing their strengths and weaknesses in sensemaking. For the analysis of the effects of team composition, the findings of this study differentiated the effects of team member characteristics, leadership style, and team culture.

The study aims at answering the following question: How does the composition of a top management team affect its strategic sensemaking?