Sebastiaan Van Doorn

Perceived Environmental Dynamism, Relative Competitive Performance, and Top Management Team Heterogeneity: Examining Correlates of Upper Echelons’ Advice-Seeking

Advice-seeking is one of the most basic practices in making real-life decisions and has been shown to be a predominant mode of knowledge acquisition at the upper echelons level. Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in particular seek advice to obtain formulated judgments, opinions, and suggestions about current strategic directions and recommended alternatives for future courses of action. In this study we distinguish between intra-organizational and extra-organizational sources of advice and examine how factors at the environmental, firm, and top management team (TMT) level relate to patterns of CEO advice-seeking. We develop and test hypotheses linking perceived environmental dynamism, relative competitive firm performance, and TMT heterogeneity to CEO advice-seeking from internal and external sources and uncover asymmetric patterns. We discuss implications for upper echelons theory and strategic decision-making research.

Entrepreneurial Orientation and Performance: Investigating Local Requirements for Entrepreneurial Decision-Making

Abstract Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) plays an important role in explaining firm performance. In this study, we investigate the relation between EO and performance at the strategic business unit (SBU) level and examine the influence of decision-making mode and social capital of the focal business unit manager. Adopting the attention-based view (ABV) as our main theoretical perspective, we examine the impact of decision-making mode (i.e., participative vs. autocratic) on the EO–performance relation. In addition, we investigate the extent to which strong network ties with actors at lower, similar, and higher hierarchical positions, respectively, enable SBU managers to effectively engage in participative decision-making processes when leveraging EO. Our findings based on 119 SBUs of one large international company provide nuanced insights into how local conditions interact to shape EO’s influence on performance.