Robert S. Dooley

Attaining Decision Quality and Commitment From Dissent: The Moderating Effects of Loyalty and Competence in Strategic Decision-Making Teams

Contradictory forces of dissent and consensus building attend the strategic decision process. Taking an information-processing perspective, we argue that two factors that affect perceptions of trus...

The New Task of R&D Management: Creating Goal-Directed Communities for Innovation

How do firms manage research and development units to optimize their innovation capabilities? First, the most innovative RD relying much more heavily on intrinsic rewards than extrinsic rewards; building cohesive teams that preserve individuality; and assuring a continuous supply of slack resources.

Strategic Alliance Outcomes: A Transaction-Cost Economics Perspective

Empirical research on strategic alliances has been limited because previous studies examined alliance outcomes, and the factors associated with them, from a single partner in a manufacturing alliance. Furthermore, many of these studies have been done from a transaction cost perspective and researchers have inferred opportunistic behavior, rather than directly measuring it and observing its actual relationship with alliance performance. Building on previous transaction cost theory and research, this study seeks to address these gaps by analyzing factors associated with both opportunistic behavior and alliance performance within a major service sector, namely the US healthcare industry. After controlling for asset specificity and alliance age, we found that partner trustworthiness and contractual safeguards were negatively related to opportunistic behavior. Furthermore, opportunistic behavior was negatively related to alliance performance, as hypothesized. Interestingly, mutual equity investments were found to be unrelated to opportunistic behavior, counter to transaction-cost logic. These findings refine and extend the transaction-cost economics perspective regarding our understanding of strategic alliance behavior and outcomes, and offer executives in service-based industries some practical ideas for assuring favorable strategic alliance outcomes.

Belaboring the Not-So-Obvious: Consensus, Commitment, and Strategy Implementation Speed and Success

One of the accepted beliefs among strategic management researchers is that strategic decision consensus among decision-makers facilitates decision implementation speed and implementation success. Despite this belief, there has been little empirical research directly examining these relationships. Using hierarchical regression, this study examines the effects of strategic decision consensus and commitment on decision implementation speed and success. Results from a sample of 68 intact strategic decision-making teams in Southeastern United States hospitals support the normatively accepted ideal that decision consensus helps build decision commitment, which in turn positively affects implementation success. Contrary to our expectations, however, decision commitment serves to slow implementation speed. The implications of these results for consensus and implementation research are discussed.

The relationship between conflict and decision outcomes

Purpose – Research on strategic decision making has over‐emphasized the importance of cognitive conflict because of its potential benefits. Recent research documented that, apart from the benefits, cognitive conflict leads to affective conflict. Taking information processing perspective, the present study seeks to argue that the benefits of cognitive conflict can be stimulated by the cognition‐based trust, while the interplay between cognitive conflict and affective conflict can be influenced by affect‐based trust. The present study therefore aims to demonstrate the divergent roles of the perceived trustworthiness as potential moderators in strategic decision‐making teams.Design/methodology/approach – Using structured survey instrument, multi‐informant data was collected from CEOs and senior executives of 109 US hospitals. After performing confirmatory factor analysis of the measures used, the data was analyzed using hierarchical regression techniques to analyze divergent roles of cognition‐ and affect‐ba...

THE BENEFITS OF STRATEGIC HOMOGENEITY AND STRATEGIC HETEROGENEITY: THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE RESOLVING PAST DIFFERENCES

Past research on the relationship between strategic variety and industry profitability has argued for either high homogeneity or high heterogeneity. In this paper, we review the literature on strategic variety and use it to develop hypotheses suggesting that the relationship between strategic variety and average industry profits is curvilinear. Based on our analysis of 61 industries, we find empirical support for our hypotheses, suggesting that very high levels of heterogeneity or homogeneity are more likely associated with industry profitability, while the industries in our sample displaying moderate levels of strategic variety are most likely to suffer from widespread financial losses.

Is too much cognitive conflict in strategic decision‐making teams too bad?

Purpose – Past research on strategic decision making has emphasized the influence of cognitive conflict and affective conflict on the decision outcomes. Early researchers demonstrated that affective conflict has negative outcomes whereas cognitive conflict has positive outcomes. While the negative outcomes of affective conflict remain non‐controversial, the positive outcomes of cognitive conflict are not always consistent. The research on the outcomes of cognitive conflict is perplexedly mixed. Taking an information processing perspective, the present study aims to examine the relationship between cognitive conflict on decision outcomes, while controlling for affective conflict.Design/methodology/approach – The authors surveyed 109 hospitals in the USA and collected data from top management teams (CEOs and senior executives). After performing confirmatory factor analysis of the measures used, the data were analyzed using hierarchical regression techniques to examine the curvilinear relationships between c...

Unified diversity in top‐level teams

Purpose – This study attempts to move beyond the “congruence assumption” surrounding top management team (TMT) demography by exploring the intervening processes that link TMT diversity and organizational performance.Design/methodology/approach – Using Fiols concept of unified diversity and employing an information processing perspective of strategic decision‐making, this article proposes a model that incorporates both moderating and mediating influences; and then tests the hypotheses using data from specific strategic decisions faced by 85 top‐level decision‐making teams within the health care industry.Findings – Evidence was found to support the expectation that goal consensus moderates the relationship between informational diversity and decision quality within the management teams. In addition, team member collaboration was found to partially mediate this effect. Research limitations/implications – The retrospective nature of the data collection captured the essence of the decision‐making process over...