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Decision comprehensiveness is an important process in determining the outcomes of strategic decision-making. While recent research began to explore its individual level antecedents, a fundamental aspect of organizational life, heterogeneous goals, have not been investigated for their effects on comprehensiveness. In this study, our purpose is to study the impact of goal heterogeneity on decision comprehensiveness and explore behavioral integration as a potential mediator in this relationship.

To test our hypotheses, we utilize a survey-based study with a sample of teams undertaking a business simulation. Our longitudinal data collection process captures team data across the initial-, mid-, and the ending-stages of the simulation.

Our findings show that goal heterogeneity negatively impacts behavioral integration and decision comprehensiveness. Moreover, the negative impact of goal heterogeneity on decision comprehensiveness is mediated through behavioral integration.

Given that many strategic decisions are undertaken by groups of individuals, it is imperative to understand the factors that impact team-level decision-making processes. Extending the literature, we empirically show the negative effects of goal heterogeneity on decision comprehensiveness. While doing so, we also show that behavioral integration – a team trait that can endure over time, as opposed to a one-time state – can be crucial in dampening this negative effect. Our findings suggest researchers, and managers, to be cautious in assuming decision comprehensiveness may easily be achieved in any given team context.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to advance research that relies on information from or about individuals and their role in strategic outcomes.

Methodology/approach – We start by identifying three streams of strategy research that call for individual-level data (upper echelons, micro-foundations, and strategy-as-practice) and proceed by examining the methods employed across 43 recent empirical studies.

Findings – Our analysis addresses three key challenges faced by researchers in these domains and catalogues the strategies used to surmount them.

Social implications – By helping to improve methods for research on individuals and strategy, this chapter advances understanding of how people throughout the organization may contribute to strategic outcomes.

Originality/value of paper – Our chapter is one of the first to analyze methods across three research domains that have heretofore been considered separate. In addition to describing what has been done, we suggest opportunities for improvement, frequently by finding ways to cross-fertilize methods from one stream into another.

There is considerable evidence that long periods of success in organisations can lead to ossification of strategy and strategic inertia. Burgelman (2002) shows how co-evolutionary lock-in occurs through the creation of a strategy vector. He demonstrates that the internal selection environment can become configured to create sources of inertia that dampen the autonomous strategy process, driving out unrelated exploration and creating a dominance of the induced, top-down strategy process. While this study shows how lock-in occurs, it does not address how a company breaks out of co-evolutionary lock-in. This is the focus of this paper. We argue that to understand how an organisation breaks out of a strategy vector a more complete conceptualisation of the structural context, and in particular the under specified cultural mechanisms, is required. It also requires an understanding of the linkages between the structural context and the new core capabilities required for breakout. Thus we first expand on what is known about strategy vectors and review research from the strategy process tradition that explores the linkages between strategy, culture and strategic change, to build a more comprehensive picture of the structural context. Our model demonstrates the extent of interconnectedness between the ‘hard’ (e.g., control systems and organisation structure) and ‘soft’ (e.g. beliefs, symbols and stories) components, and that development of new required capabilities is dependent on a holistic shift in all these aspects of the structural context, including, therefore, change in the organisation's culture. We then illustrate the link between lock-in, capability development and culture change through the case of the famous Formula One team, Ferrari. We finish with a discussion of the implications of our findings for strategic change.

Julia Balogun is the Professor Sir Roland Smith Chair in strategic management at Lancaster University Management School (UK) and a fellow of the Advanced Institute for Management (AIM). Julia's research and consulting centers on strategy development, strategic change and transformation. She has a particular interest in how large corporations transform themselves to both retain and regain competitive advantage in the face of declining performance and is increasingly interested in how this achieved in multinational corporations. She adopts a sociological perspective to explore strategizing in organizations, and is convenor of the EGOS standing working group on Strategy as Practice and one of the founder members of the new Strategizing, Activities and Practice Interest Group at the Academy. Her research has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies and Long Range Planning. Julia serves on the editorial boards of several leading journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, and Long Range Planning.

The first annual volume of Research in Organization Change and Development was published by JAI Press in 1987. Since then, ROCD has provided a special platform for scholars and practitioners to share new research-based insights. Volume eighteen continues the tradition of providing insightful and thought provoking chapters. The chapters in the volume represent a commitment to maintaining the high quality of work that our readers have come to expect from this publication.

Welcome to volume 6 of Research Methodology in Strategy and Management! In creating this series about eight years ago, our belief was that the organizational sciences needed a forum wherein leading scholars could openly express their views about important and emerging issues within research methods. In particular, we wanted the book series to serve as a metaphorical bridge between areas of inquiry that could benefit from increased interaction with each other. This sixth volume of the series recalls these roots by being built around the theme of “Building methodological bridges.”

The purpose of this paper is to present new aspects of the tension between creativity and productivity and improve the understanding on how research can be developed in very restricted environments, such as the context of an organization managed using the methods of Project Management. And more generally, it introduces the rhetoric of judgment as a fundamental aspect involved in the development and specification of projects.

The theoretical approach is based on the phenomenological theory of human intentional action developed by Alfred Schutz, in which the notion of mental project is more flexible than that of project management. In it the concepts of subaction and repeated action are considered a combination of similar actions already performed. The Kantian notion of judgment is introduced to outline self-persuasion as a fundamental source of creativity.

The introduction of an extended notion of project and routine involving judgment expands the rational, generic and technical notion of project management. And the rhetorical aspect of judgment, at the individual level, establishes the possibility to deliver unexpected outcomes that are considered creative.

The proposed notions of project and routines mediated through the rhetoric of judgment present theoretical and practical progress in the subject of managing projects.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an organizing lens for viewing the distinct contributions to knowledge production from those research communities addressing the impact of competitive strategy on company performance in general, and the influence of cost leadership and differentiation strategy on organizational performance in detail.

The research methodology was based on the PRISMA review, and thematic analysis based on an iterative process of open coding was analyzed and then the sample was analyzed by illustrating the research title, objectives, method, data analysis, sample size, variables and country.

The main factor that influenced the competitive strategy is strategic growth; strategic growth has a significant influence on competitive strategy. Furthermore, competitive strategy will boost firm network, performance measurement and organization behavior. In the same way, the internal goal factor will enhance organizational effectiveness. Also, a differentiation strategy will support management practice factors, strategic positions, product price, product characteristics and company performance.

This study contributes to the literature by identifying a framework of competitive strategy factors, company performance factors, cost leadership strategy factors, differentiation strategy factors and competitive strategy with global market factors. This study provides a complete picture and description of the resulting body knowledge in competitive strategy and organizational performance.