George A. Shinkle

Organizational Aspirations, Reference Points, and Goals: Building on the Past and Aiming for the Future

Three distinct frameworks have been advanced by scholars to analyze organizational aspirations: behavioral theory, Ansoff’s strategic management view, and strategic reference point theory. These frameworks, or views, are grounded in different assumptions and mechanisms. This article reviews and synthesizes the three views, also drawing on literatures in economics, performance measurement, and psychology, to present a comprehensive understanding of organizational aspirations. This review shows the literature consists primarily of studies using behavioral theory explanations, typically provides studies of the consequences of theoretically inferred aspiration levels, is impoverished in terms of field measurement of aspirations, and lacks comparative or integrative studies of the three views. Drawing on this critique, the article identifies theoretical and empirical gaps and provides guidance for future research.

Attention to Fairness versus Profits: The Determinants of Satisficing Pricing

We investigate determinants of the competitive behaviour of satisficing, non-profit-maximizing pricing. Taking a behavioural approach, we argue that pricing decisions are motivated by fairness objectives as well as the desire to achieve economic objectives. We draw from the attention-based view to build our theoretical model explaining the contextual conditions that are most likely to be associated with attention to fairness relative to attention to achieving maximum profits when setting prices. Our hypothesized predictors of satisficing pricing decisions encompass the institutional context in which the firm is embedded, the exchange context with customers and suppliers, and the context internal to the firm. Hypotheses are tested with survey data of over 3000 firms from 15 countries. We find that the decision to set prices at a satisficing level is remarkably common, and its prevalence is associated with contextual factors that are consistent with greater attention to fairness concerns.