L. J. Bourgeois

STRATEGIC GOALS, PERCEIVED UNCERTAINTY, AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE IN VOLATILE ENVIRONMENTS

An untested proposition in the normative strategic management literature is that strategists should make decisions based on accurate assessments of their external environments. Empirical organization theory literature holds the assumption that high levels of perceived uncertainty are detrimental to performance. Both literatures assume goal consensus to be important to effectiveness. This study investigated the relationship between top management perceptions of uncertainty, corporate Goal structures, and industry volatility in explaining economic performance in 20 firms. Findings suggested that attempts to avoid true environmental uncertainty and to seek high levels of goal congruence may be dysfunctional.

Conflict and Strategic Choice: How Top Management Teams Disagree

Substantive conflict is natural within top management teams as executives struggle with making high-stakes choices under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty. Yet, many top management teams fail to sufficiently debate appropriate courses of action. This article reports on a field study of top management teams and examines four managerial levers that can help executives overcome the cognitive, emotional, and political barriers to engaging in conflict. These levers are: build a heterogeneous team; create frequent interactions within that team; cultivate a distinct symphony of roles such as Counselor, Futurist, and Ms. Action around fundamental tensions within managing; and use multiple-lens tactics such as competitor role playing and multiple alternatives to provide unexpected vantage points on key issues.

Five Steps to Strategic Action

Is there more to effective corporate performance than merely developing comprehensive strategic plans and strong corporate cultures? Recent research suggests that effective, innovative firms capitalize on strategic initiatives that originate on the firing line at lower management levels.

Taming Interpersonal Conflict in Strategic Choice: How Top Management Teams Argue, but Still Get Along

Conflict is commonplace in strategic decision-making. When that conflict is focused on substantive issues, it is enormously effective in improving the range of information considered, the depth of understanding, and the quality of the choice. But, when it becomes interpersonal such that negative emotions (eg anger, frustration, anxiety) take over, it can strangle the choice process. So, skillful decision-makers temper interpersonal conflict, even in the context of high substantive conflict. This chapter describes how they do it by exploring the management of interpersonal conflict. Using case studies, we find several tactics that contain interpersonal conflict: Keep conflict focused on issues (not people) through (1) factual data, and (2) multiple alternatives; maintain a collaborative (not competitive) frame with (3) common goals and (4) humor; and create a sense of fairness (not inequity) through (5) balanced power structures and (6) consensus with qualification. Finally, these tactics not only limit interpersonal conflict, but also work together and, unexpectedly, build substantive conflict, speed the process, and are associated with high performance.

Analyzing Corporate Culture in Its Strategic Context

The topic of corporate culture has been receiving a good deal of attention recently. Academics and practitioners alike have embraced this theme in efforts to explain and perpetuate effective management practices (Peters and Waterman, 1982; Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Pascale and Athos, 1981; Ouchi, 1981; Schwartz and Davis, 1981). Although many authors have recognized and attempted to study the impact of culture on organizational behavior and the use of culture as a strategic management tool, methods by which a company’s current culture can be analyzed and assessed with respect to any particular strategy are relatively few. This paper describes a method by which the impact of a corporate culture can be identified in light of the firm’s strategic situation. The method is a technique that was developed while working with a division of a multinational firm during a strategy development program. The paper will focus on the interactive nature of strategic management and corporate culture and a process by which managers can better understand the importance of this relationship in the context of their

Type of Resource Interactions and Acquisition Success

Strategy research on mergers and acquisitions has focused on classifying mergers into related, unrelated categories and recently according to strategic motives. By contrast, we focus on how the combined resources of the merging firms interact to create value. We identify five primary types of resource interactions and examine their inherent post-merger-integration challenges as well as their probabilities of successful value creation and capture. By using this lens, acquirers will be able to identify the primary sources of value in any acquisition that they are contemplating and anticipate post-merger obstacles in realizing this value. This framework will also enable managers to reconsider acquisition strategies that they have avoided because of the poor batting average of acquisitions in general.