Understanding the Holy Grail of strategic management: the micro-foundations and performance conditions of dynamic capabilities
Year: 2012
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The dynamic capability view remains silent when it comes to the origins of and the micro-processes behind the development of these capabilities. We analyze how dynamic capabilities are developed over time in a new venture which was confronted with a significant change in its environment. We used an inductive casestudy design, collecting data through participant observation over a four-year period. We complemented this data with content analysis of email correspondence and analysis of board documents, meeting minutes and different versions of the business plan. We show that the building blocks of dynamic capabilities exist of the (a) company’s capacity to manage attention across different levels of the hierarchy to create perception of the changes in the environment through a process of issue selling, (b) the level to which it succeeds to overcome different levels of cognitive dissonance among its individual decisions makers to create willingness through collective sense making and (c) the company’s capacity to manage competing objectives to enable the change implementation process by integrating efficiency and flexibility as a duality. We thus extend the dynamic capability perspective by describing the micro-processes behind it and embedding them within the attentionbased view, cognitive dissonance theory and the literature on competing objectives.
Author: Robin De Cock
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2206819221