Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: Managers make strategy revision judgments, which are judgments that affect how well the firm can revise its strategy when new information comes to light. Using two studies, my dissertation examines how formatting the firm’s strategy as a strategy map affects two types of strategy revision judgments. First, I study middle managers’ judgments on passing along new information to upper management. Second, I study managers’ judgments of the relevance of new information and the appropriateness of the firm’s strategy. In my first study, I find that middle managers are more likely to withhold new information from upper management when they feel that information would be less impressive to upper management. Middle managers also tend to punish their subordinates with less positive performance evaluations when the subordinates provide them with such less impressive information. However, middle managers with sufficient experience who receive a strategy map are more likely to pass along such less impressive information to upper management than those with comparable experience who do not receive a strategy map. In my second study, I find that receiving a strategy map improves managers’ judgements of the relevance of new information. I also find that receiving a strategy map improves managers’ judgments about the appropriateness of the firm’s strategy in light of this new information. However, I find this latter effect depends on whether it is easy to understand the cause-and-effect relationships depicted in a strategy map. Finally, in an extensions chapter, I propose three neuroimaging studies that extend the above studies. One of these neuroimaging studies more fully describes the motivation, theory, and method of the study. This study approaches the relationship between strategy maps and strategy revision differently, extending prior research that suggests a strategy map leads workers to better allocate effort between short-term focused and long-term focused activities. I hope to provide evidence on the neural processing, and thus the thought processes, that underlie this prior finding. Such evidence would improve practitioners’ predictions of how long the effect would persist over time, which informs practitioners about whether to revise the firm’s strategy to include a strategy map.
Author: Brian D. Knox
Language: English
Subfield: Accounting
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2772461762