Suchergebnisse

This paper explores the role of critical task specialists in strategic decision making and presents a theoretical model relating critical task specialist participation in decision making to the organization's overall strategy and the nature of the decision. This exploratory study examines scope and intensity of physician participation in hospital decision making. Intensity of critical task specialist participation is explained by content of the decision and by the organization's strategy, while scope of participation is explained by decision content. The findings suggest the need for more complex models of participation than are normally used in decision‐making research. The findings also suggest that executives, in managing strategic decision‐making processes, should pay attention to questions of both scope and intensity of participation. The results suggest that critical task specialists play a different role in the decision process, depending on specific decision content and organization strategy.

The authors challenge the old school of hierarchical strategic leadership that dominates the military professional culture and, in contrast, emphasize complex adaptive systems (CASs) as a compelling alternative mental model to view the military profession. The authors suggest eight leadership tasks that come to the fore when the mental model of the military as a professional CAS is used to examine the circumstances that engulf military activities: relationship building, loose coupling, complicating, diversifying, sensemaking, learning, improvising, and emergent thinking. These are distinguished from the traditional tasks of role defining, standardization, simplifying, socializing, decision making, knowing, commanding and controlling, and planning based on estimates.

ABSTRACTEach time managers are faced with a strategic decision they decide how to decide. Specifically, they make choices about who has necessary information and, therefore, who needs to participate in the decision. Such responses to strategic issues are believed to be affected by the way in which decision makers interpret issues. However, organizations develop habitual responses to issues and may be predisposed because of their attention to rules and routines, or because of past performance, to respond to strategic issues in certain ways regardless of how issues are interpreted. We examined the direct and indirect effects of predisposition (rule orientation and past financial performance) and interpretation of strategic issues on the participation of internal stakeholder groups in strategic decision making. Executives in 52 organizations indicated that rule orientation and performance are directly linked to participation in strategic decision making, and that interpretation and rule orientation are directly linked to each other. Implications for managers include the notion that any effort to improve decision‐making effectiveness by shaping how organizational members frame and interpret issues will be constrained by the organization's existing routines as well as its past performance.