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The Organizational View of Strategic Management

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Abstract

The organizational view of strategic management views strategic decisions as outcomes of organizational goals and environmental influences. Central research streams are institutional theory and network theory on environmental influences, and learning theory and resource dependence theory on organizational interaction with the environment. Currently active research topics are centered on how societal groups influence organizations, intraorganizational individuals and groups pursue their own goals, and organizations pursue their goals by choosing strategic actions that maneuver societal constraints. Research is beginning to crystallize a view of environments and organizational structures interacting closely with strategy, with organizations learning to shape their interorganizational networks and surrounding institutions to their benefit. Comparison of performance and aspiration levels on multiple goals helps organizations time and direct strategic changes. The organizational view is a prominent part of strategic management and has enough unanswered questions to spur significant future research.
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THE ORGANIZATIONAL VIEW OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
Henrich R. Greve
Rudolf and Valeria Maag Chaired Professor of Entrepreneurship
INSEAD
1 Ayer Rajah Avenue
Singapore 138676
Tel: +65 67995259; Fax: +65-67995399
henrich.greve@insead.edu
August 2020
Forthcoming in Strategic Management: State of the Field and Its Future, edited by Irene Duhaime,
Michael Hitt, and Marjorie Lyles.
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Introduction
To paraphrase Cyert and March (1963: 1), an interest in how the firm makes economic
decisions implies a need to examine organizational structures and processes, and to
understand how decisions are made in an organizational context. It leads to an organizational
view of strategic management. Not all organizational theory concerns strategic management
and not all strategy theories are organizational, but every strategic decision that we study is a
product of an organizational context. The organizational theory most relevant to strategy has
a 40-year history, and it has gradually increased in its volume of research and connection to
strategy. This chapter gives a selective review of its history and current state before
suggesting promising future development. It is selective because it reflects my preference for
presenting research streams that are large and highly relevant to strategic management.
The organizational view has three important premises. First, formal organizations are
the central actors. Second, organizational actions are the product of decisions made by
boundedly rational individuals acting alone or in groups, with goals and information
structured by the organization. Third, organizations must be understood in relation to their
environment, which provides a broad range of resources they depend on along with
regulatory and social constraints. A central question in organizational theory is how
organizations adapt to their environment, or in other words, how firms choose strategies.
Other central questions are how organizations affect their members and society, but these
questions will not be treated here.
Foundations of the Organizational View
Although organizational theory is older, the organizational view of strategy dates back to the
1970s, which saw the appearance of major research streams examining organizational
responses to the environment, which is defined as external actors and processes that could
affect organizational actions or outcomes (e.g., Scott, 1987). Theory and evidence of how
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organizations come to understand the environment, face the opportunities and constraints it
generates, and interact with it are inherently strategic, so this period built the foundations of
the organizational view of strategy.
Although each major organizational theory addresses a wide range of topics and
phenomena, they can be roughly divided by emphasis. The main theories of how the
environment is formed and made known to the organization are organizational ecology and
network theory (Brass, Galaskiewicz, Greve, and Tsai, 2004; Carroll and Hannan, 2000;
Shipilov and Gawer, 2020). The main theory of how the environment imposes or constrains
organizational action is institutional theory (Scott, 2001). The main theories of how the
organization interacts with the environment are resource dependence theory and learning
theory (Gavetti, Greve, Levinthal, and Ocasio, 2012; Wry, Cobb, and Aldrich, 2013).
Taking Strategic Management Journal articles as a measure of the presence of each
organizational theory in strategic management, network theory has had a steady and large
representation in the last 20 years, indicating significant interest in environmental formation
and discovery. Institutional theory has had a significant presence for a little more than 10
years, showing more recent, but similar level of interest in environmental opportunities and
constraints. Organizational learning has had a significant presence for more than 20 years and
a recent increase that shows long-lasting and increasing interest in organizational interaction
with the environment. The field of strategy appears to be making a gradual transition in
research interest from the formation and understanding of environments, through
environmental effects on the organization, to organizational interaction with the environment.
The trend is toward organizational theories that give the firm an active role in forming its
strategy and adapting it to the environment. Organizational theory is becoming more
strategic.
The history of organizational theory in strategic management is best introduced by
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selected phenomena that we now understand better thanks to earlier work. For example, it is
now well known that industries have a temporary period of rapid growth driven by density-
dependent founding and failure (e.g., Hannan, Carroll, Dundon, and Torres, 1995; Perretti,
Negro, and Lomi, 2008), and firm movement into new product/market niches is driven by
similar factors (Carroll, Bigelow, Seidel, and Tsai, 1996; Dobrev and Kim, 2006; Ruef,
2000). The fragmentation of industries that have had a period of high concentration is
understood to be a function of organizations discovering and exploiting the market niche
structure (Boone, Brocheler, and Carroll, 2000; Carroll and Swaminathan, 2000).
Early research on institutional theory started by explaining how organizations adopt
symbols that legitimize them in the eyes of external evaluators without making actual
strategic or operational changes (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), but it has since moved on to
investigate how the environment directs strategic change. Pioneering findings showed that
emergent industries become established through a variety of political and social processes
that make the function and reliability of the product or service better known (Rao, 1994;
Zelizer, 1978). Firms gain opportunities to enter new markets through new ideologies offered
by social movements or other firms in the industry (Haveman, Rao, and Paruchuri, 2007;
Negro, Hannan, and Rao, 2011; Rao, Monin, and Durand, 2003; Weber, Heinze, and
DeSoucey, 2008). Changes in societal belief systems are entrepreneurial opportunities, and
this is known and exploited by industry participants (Delmestri and Greenwood, 2016).
Network theory views interorganizational ties as a sensory system that lets firms
discover and evaluate innovations through observation and communication, and we have
many studies on how major changes diffuse through network ties among organizations.
Strategic actions that diffuse through interorganizational ties include innovative market
positions, production assets, and business practices (Greve, 2009; Haunschild and Beckman,
1998; Westphal, Seidel, and Stewart, 2001). An important part of the theory and evidence is a
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movement away from the observation-only idea that firms imitate what they observe without
careful consideration of the consequences. Multiple studies have examined how controversial
or uncertain innovations have limited or slow diffusion while firms assess their value
(Fligstein, 1991; Jonsson, 2009). The role of communication is especially clear in the
diffusion of practices that organizations try to conceal. Learning of effective internal
operations is facilitated by network ties across competitors (Ingram and Baum, 1997), and
deception and collusion is also learnt through network ties (Baker and Faulkner, 1993).
Learning theory has a significant research record showing how firms improve their
operations through their own experience and vicarious learning from other firms, and how
these processes can serve as either complements or substitutes (Baum and Ingram, 1998; Kim
and Miner, 2007; Madsen, 2009; Simon and Lieberman, 2010). More recently, a research
stream has developed on how the timing and content of strategic changes are shaped by
environmental feedback in the form of performance relative to aspiration levels (Baum,
Rowley, Shipilov, and Chuang, 2005; Gaba and Joseph, 2013; Greve, 1998; Tarakci et al.,
2018). There is also significant research on how learning contributes to innovations through
directing the organization towards exploration (Daneels, 2002; McGrath, 2001) and
improving its capabilities (Jain, 2013; Lane and Lubatkin, 1998).
These are brief examples of how the organizational view of strategy has led to many
findings that are important for understanding strategic change. They were chosen for their
relevance to strategic management, and contain only a sample of cites from larger research
streams. They effectively exemplify the history of the organizational view of strategy because
they share two central features of past research. First, the theory and evidence were
developed with an eye to understanding organizations, with little concern for strategic
management. Second, because many organizational actions are strategic, the theory and
evidence produced knowledge of value to the field of strategic management. Currently,
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organization theory and strategic management are better aligned than in the past, so much
theory and evidence in organizational research is developed with the intent of informing
strategic management.
Current Research Streams in the Organizational View
The main organizational theories have changed little in recent years, so we can treat the
theoretical foundations as stable but with growing detail and evidence. Thus, elaboration of
recent theoretical developments is less fruitful than a discussion of the applied research topics
that are currently popular. If we take articles in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy
of Management Journal, and Organization Science as indicators of active organizational
research relevant to strategic management, inspection of recently published articles shows
that the following research topics are important:
1. Societal groups influence strategic decisions, especially through actors such as social
movements and the state.
2. Individual actors and groups influence strategic decisions, including but not limited to
the CEO, top management team, and board of directors. This research is discussed in
sections 7, 8 and 10 of this volume and will not be treated here.
3. Organizations choose strategic actions that maneuver complex institutional and power
structures such as institutional logics, community relations, and symbolic or linguistic
effects.
4. Organizations mobilize and direct the strategy to pursue multiple goals including
environmentally imposed goals.
These will be discussed in turn.
Societal groups. Social movements can inflict damage on targeted firms, so they are
capable of changing key parts of strategy and operations (Bartley and Child, 2011), and they
can eliminate or reduce specific opportunities by pressuring political institutions (Hiatt,
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Grandy, and Lee, 2015; Ingram and Rao, 2004). These activities are especially powerful
when directed at low-performing organizations and when amplified by coverage in the press
(King, 2008) or social media (Zhang and Luo, 2013). Firms are not passive recipients of such
pressure, however, and seek to counteract it by making their good deeds better known, to
compensate or distract (McDonnell and King, 2013).
While social movements are often sources of political pressures, there is also research
examining how the state, parties, or other political actors make firms comply with costly
demands of actions to benefit society (Reid and Toffel, 2009). Firm relationships with
political actors can be quite close when the firms are seen as important solutions to societal
problems (Tihanyi and Hegarty, 2007) or the political actors are powerful (Stark and Vedres,
2012). Again, firms are not passive recipients of such pressure, and can counteract it through
actions that evade regulatory constraints (Funk and Hirschman, 2014; Joseph, Ocasio, and
McDonnell, 2014) or through lobbying to shape regulation or enforcement (Rudy and
Johnson, 2016).
Mass media outlets voice and organize public pressure on firms and have gained
increased attention in current organizational research. They can lead to adoption of highly
consequential organizational practices (Shipilov, Greve, and Rowley, 2019), as well as
changes in the firm strategy (Bednar, Boivie, and Prince, 2013). This happens in part because
media coverage often provides increased attention to the firm by stakeholders, including
mobilization for change (Kölbel, Busch, and Jancso, 2017). Mass media effects are exploited
by firms, too, because efforts to be covered by news media can be rewarded through
increased access to funding (Petkova, Rindova, and Gupta, 2013). Social media postings by
individuals are also an important part of the organizational environment, and their evaluations
affect product and firm outcomes (Goldberg, Hannan, and Kovács, 2016; Greve and Song,
2017; Wang, Wezel, and Forgues, 2016). Our knowledge of firm responses to this part of the
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environment is still incomplete, but we know that organizations make use of media to
influence other actors such as the state (Yue, Wang, and Yang, 2018).
Environmental structures. Industries can be reorganized according to new principles
for organizing firms and competition, known as institutional logics (Thornton, 2002). Firms
can be similarly reorganized, as institutional logics compete to determine structures and
processes such as corporate governance (Joseph et al., 2014; Shipilov, Greve, and Rowley,
2010), innovation practices (Pahnke, Katila, and Eisenhardt, 2015), and use of occupations
(Lounsbury, 2002). Communities also have different requirements of firm behaviors, leading
to community-firm matching both on business and social behaviors (Greve and Rao, 2012;
Lee and Lounsbury, 2015; Schneiberg, King, and Smith, 2008). For example, communities
with experience organizing voluntary associations and businesses with mutual ownership
(e.g., thrifts and cooperatives) are difficult competitive arenas for regular business firms.
Some of these distinctions are related to symbols such as the language used to describe
products and firms, and firms that carefully position themselves in the symbolic environment
gain advantages (Barlow, Verhaal, and Hoskins, 2016; Granqvist, Grodal, and Woolley,
2013; Hsu and Grodal, 2015). Positioning a firm can be complex, however, as shown by
research on coexisting institutional logics in conflict with each other. These pose a special
problem for firms, which are left with the options of committing to one or making a
compromise between multiple logics (Greenwood et al., 2011).
Organizational goals. Organizational pursuit of basic goals such as survival and
profitability has seen much research in organizational theory (Shinkle, 2012), and a research
stream that is currently gaining increased focus examines how organizations react to multiple
goals, or to goals that are separate from profitability. This research has emphasized three
broad types of goals. The first is goals that are related to profitability in the short or long run,
such as market share (Greve, 1998), network ties (Baum et al., 2005), or innovations (Tyler
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and Caner, 2016). The second is goals that are mainly related to managerial preferences, such
as firm growth (Greve, 2008). The third is goals that are mainly related to societal or
stakeholder benefit, such as safety (Baum and Dahlin, 2007; Gaba and Greve, 2019) or
corporate governance (Rowley, Shipilov, and Greve, 2017). There is increased interest in
discovering what goals organizations pursue and how they choose between them, and
preliminary findings indicate that firms are multi-goal actors, but with survival and
profitability emphasized, as one would expect.
Future of the Organizational View
In the past, the abundance of organizational theories and their emphasis on environmental
effects on organizations served as barriers against integration with strategic management.
These barriers are now lower. The modern synthesis of organization theory and strategy is
that problem and opportunity discovery by internal decision makers directs strategic change.
The behavioral theory of the firm is a good example of this synthesis. It has inspired a growth
in research combining performance feedback, problem identification, solutions search, and
solution sellers, all of which form inputs to a dominant coalition of decision-makers. The
environment in turn constrains, facilitates, and responds, just as current theory and evidence
holds, and starts a new round of adaptation. The modern synthesis differs from earlier
organization theory in seeing an interactive relationship between organizations and their
environment, rather than unidirectional influence. In the modern synthesis, the firm initiates
actions based on internal and external signals; it has an active role in searching for
alternatives but is also provided alternatives from external actors; and its decision making is
premised on internal goals but also influenced by the external experiences of decision
makers.
Similar movement towards the firm interacting with the environment can be seen in
other parts of organizational theory and will become a growing part of the organizational
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view of strategy. There has long been ecological research on how firms attract founding of
firms with complementary products, leading to regional specialization that crosses industries
(Audia, Freeman, and Reynolds, 2006; Sorenson and Audia, 2000). Interorganizational ties
with suppliers, especially, are seen as sufficiently important that firms adding manufacturing
locations sometimes encourage existing suppliers to follow rather than use the existing
suppliers in the new location (Martin, Swaminathan, and Mitchell, 1998). This research has
given rise to work on how organizational environments are partially created by firms, and the
consequences of this creation for competition. One branch of this research examines how
employees become entrepreneurs (spinouts) and use knowledge gained from their work to
improve their venture (Argyres and Mostafa, 2016; Dencker and Gruber, 2015). Another
branch examines how corporations seek to fold external ventures into their organization
through corporate venture capital and acquisitions, and also gain advantages from selective
spinoffs of parts of their business (Gaba and Bhattacharya, 2012; Katila, Rosenberger, and
Eisenhardt, 2008; McKendrick, Wade, and Jaffee, 2009; Vidal and Mitchell, 2015).
Each of these branches are early in their development and will see significant new
research. In addition, the current evidence on how organizational founding and other events
that modify the ecology of firms affect communities (e.g., Greve and Rao, 2014) can be
extended by examining whether and how communities become specialists in founding
specific kinds of firms, or alternatively, whether such events make communities more
entrepreneurial in general. Because the origins of such community differences are not yet
well known, but are presumably related to an ecology of organizations that have either direct
synergies or synergies through their effects on the labor market, the duration of such
community effects should be explored as well. Research so far indicates that the effects can
endure for decades (Greve and Rao, 2014), which adds strategic significance to location
choices.
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There has long been research on how firms establish network ties with other firms that
hold complementary capabilities, and this research has examined strategic considerations and
different forms of social similarity or proximity (Chung, Singh, and Lee, 2000; Mitsuhashi
and Greve, 2009; Powell, White, Koput, and Owen-Smith, 2005). Elaborations of this
research include an increased focus on how network ties are broken when they are no longer
useful or better alternatives become available (Greve, Baum, Mitsuhashi, and Rowley, 2010;
Greve, Mitsuhashi, and Baum, 2013). There is also increased work on how firms can adjust
their network tie formation to fit their current strategy (Shipilov, Li, and Greve, 2011; Sytch,
Tatarynowicz, and Gulati, 2012). Current network research is finding that the common
principles for tie creation found in earlier research are used selectively by firms depending on
their fit to strategic goals. For example, network ties connecting firms of different status may
be coupled with asymmetric resource exchanges because high-status firms extract resources
from low-status firm in exchange for the benefit of associating with them (Castellucci and
Ertug, 2010).
With network theory having examined the benefits of different network positions and
firm actions to re-arrange their networks, the next step forward is to address a crucial missing
piece in network theory and evidence. For parsimony, network theory starts with the
assumption of identical nodes (firms), deviating from this mainly through controls for firm
differences. This assumption is contrary to the evidence on firm differences accumulated in
strategic management research. It is also a missed opportunity because it means that scholars
still know too little about the joint effect of firm characteristics and network positions on
strategic outcomes. Nor is much known about how firm characteristics affect the tendency to
change firm network positions and draw benefits from such changes. It is widely recognized
that gaining and exploiting beneficial network positions are important strategic actions, but
we should examine more closely whether firms differ in their ability to take these actions,
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either as a result of consciously building up a network management capability or as a side
effect of other firm characteristics. Exploring these questions is a significant research
opportunity for scholars in organizational theory and strategic management.
Research using institutional theory has increasingly focused on the firm shaping the
institutional environment or maneuvering within its constraints. Work on how firms act as
institutional entrepreneurs seeking to shape institutions to fit their business has old origins
(Dobbin, 1995), and has led to significant research on the formation of institutions to support
new products or services in emerging industries (Hargadon and Douglas, 2001; Munir and
Phillips, 2005). An important discovery is that firms forming the institutional environment is
not only done in emerging industries, but also in mature industries (Greenwood and Suddaby,
2006). In an industry as old as banking, partially contradictory institutional constraints
complicate the work of teams seeking to found a bank, but when resolved well improve its
chances of success (Almandoz, 2012). Similar balancing has also been observed in other
contexts (Jonsson and Regnar, 2009; Smets, Jarzabkowski, Burke, and Spee, 2015).
Conflicting demands on the organization can be used to delay reactions to institutional
demands and better calibrate the response (Raaijmakers, Vermeulen, Meeus, and Zietsma,
2015; Zhang and Greve, 2018).
An important area for future research lies in recognizing that the emphasis in early
institutional theory on firms decoupling symbolic actions from actual production was a
parsimonious simplification. The reality is that institutions reach into firms, affecting the
costs and benefits of strategic actions and even altering firm goals. Consider, for example, the
increase in ESG (environmental, social, governance) goals imposed on firms and the rise of
ESG funds as investors (Odziemkowska and Henisz, 2020). Given the importance of the
resources that are released to actors fulfilling ESG goals and the sophistication of actors
checking whether firms truly fulfill such goals, it would be surprising if ESG goals were not
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added to the internal firm goal structure. Such goal additions are an institutional effect that is
so important that we need to know much more about it. Generic examination of how
institutions affect closely related behaviors (e.g., ESG pressures affecting CSP reports) is not
enough: researchers should examine the effects on strategic decision-making processes and
actual organizational changes. This is only an example of an institution that reaches deep into
firm decision-making, and we can expect future research will uncover many more like it.
Resource dependence theory suggests that firms interact with the environment in
order to avoid costly dependency (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978), and this work has continued to
produce new findings on organizational actions to avoid dependence or gain power (Casciaro
and Piskorski, 2005; Howard, Withers, and Tihanyi, 2016). It includes work on the defense
mechanisms that entrepreneurial ventures put in place to gain resources from more powerful
firms without exposing themselves to takeover attempts or other uses of power (Hallen,
Katila, and Rosenberger, 2014; Katila et al., 2008). It has also shown the cost of firm actions
to rearrange dependence relations, because the counterparts of these relations observe the
firm and act to neutralize or overturn attempts to gain power over them (Rogan and Greve,
2015). Recent research has also found that organizations seek to control demands from their
institutional environment through mechanisms such as establishing political or administrative
ties with the state (Hillman, 2005; Zhang and Greve, 2018).
Because resource dependence between pairs of firms can be conceptualized as a
specific type of network tie, resource dependence theory and network theory have always
been related. It naturally follows that each of them can inform the other also in future
research. A notable gap in current research is that resource dependence theory has produced
much less knowledge on the re-arrangement of interfirm ties that result in resource
dependence than one might expect, given the quick progress in network theory. It would be
easy to follow up with research examining how much firms modify their exchange ties (and
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other ties producing dependence), how effective these changes are, and whether the changes
are connected to firm differences. Indeed, among organizational theories examined in the last
decades, resource dependence theory has always been distinctively strategic in its predictions
and implications for practice, suggesting that it should be a high priority research effort.
A recent development in learning theory suggests that external goals the institutional
environment seeks to impose are not necessarily adopted by the organization but may instead
be ignored or altered. Thus, changing institutional environments make performance measures
less important for determining organizational decisions (Wezel and Saka-Helmhout, 2006). In
particular, institutional pressures in favor of specific goals fail if the goal is not universally
adopted and firm decision-makers are opposed (Shipilov et al., 2010) or need to attend to
more critical performance goals (Desai, 2008). Indeed, quick adoption of goals is usually
associated with support from powerful actors internally (Crilly, Zollo, and Hansen, 2012;
Sauder and Espeland, 2009) or externally (e.g., Luo, Wang, Raithel, and Zheng, 2015). This
idea ties learning theory more closely to theories on power sources and use in organizations,
such as resource dependence theory. It also suggests that the research streams outlined above
can be combined with learning theory to produce knowledge on how each organization
adjusts to their changes in network position and resource dependence. After all, the bounded
rationality of decision makers suggests that organizational changes that may be beneficial in
the longer run still requires learning to produce higher performance.
An important discovery in current learning theory research is how organizations rely
on performance feedback to choose the timing and form of major corporate decisions such as
acquisitions and divestments (Haleblian, Kim, and Rajagopalan, 2006; Kuusela, Keil, and
Maula, 2017; Vidal and Mitchell, 2015) as well as smaller-scale decisions like resource
acquisition and product line trimming (Greve, 2011; Joseph, Klingebiel, and Wilson, 2016;
Parker, Krause, and Covin, 2017). Many of the findings can be interpreted as learning shaped
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by political events within the organization, because changes in the performance influences
the relative power of different coalitions as well as the fit of alternatives to situations
characterized by abundant or scarce resources (Gaba and Joseph, 2013; Kuusela et al., 2017;
Zhang and Greve, 2019). If a firm is experiencing low performance following a series of
expansion decisions (such as acquisitions), top managers who favor further expansion will
have difficulty implementing it because they face resource scarcity and increased resistance
from other top managers. Organizational changes following these events are likely to
maintain or reduce the firm size.
Performance feedback followed by problemistic search is a well-documented process,
but so far little research has documented its consequences for attaining or maintaining
competitive advantage. The answers to two key questions are currently not well understood.
First, problemistic search is not required for organizations to change, because organizations
can also innovate following slack search (search using available resources). We do not know
whether changes made following problemistic search perform better than those made after
slack search. We are also not sure how often changes are made after slack search, and under
what conditions. Second, a key element of performance feedback theory is that organizations
search and change in response to problems, not in response to opportunities. Although the
theory is clear on this point, the empirical evidence shows that organizations also change
when the performance is above the aspiration level, though less often than when it is below.
We do not know whether the changes made when performing above the aspiration level are
in response to opportunities, and whether they perform better than changes made in response
to problems. Initial evidence suggests that making changes such as market position (Greve,
1999) and production technology (Desai, 2010) below the aspiration level gives better
performance than changing them above the aspiration level. These findings on the benefits of
problemistic search go against our fascination with entrepreneurial search for opportunities
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and should be studied further. The evidence on when firms make changes is by now so rich
that we should now investigate the consequences of the change timing as well as the change
content.
These recent changes and additions within the field of organizational theory have the
common theme of exploring the interaction of organization and environment in more detail.
The firm makes changes that are targeted towards the environment or even seeks to
alter the environment; actors in the environment seek to reach into the firm and influence its
decision making. This is an adaptive cycle that keeps modifying the strategic and operational
decisions of each firm, leading to a dynamic view of firm strategies and market competition.
Discussion and Conclusions
Strategic decision making and execution are done by organizations, for organizations, making
organizational theory a central part of strategy. Organizational theory and strategy are
interrelated like two ends of a string. Ask an organizational question, and a strategic answer
will follow. Ask a strategic question, and an organizational answer will follow. This close
relationship means that the two fields will continue to develop in tandem, as has been
increasingly true in recent years.
The close relationship of these fields has not always been recognized, and indeed
some of the theory in each of these sister disciplines has been constructed in ways that make
it appear less relevant for the other than it is. Organizational theories focusing on
unidirectional effects from the environment to the organization give the impression that
strategy cannot be formed because the environment is determinate. The reality is that
environmental influences give opportunities and constraints that the strategist must choose
from, and moreover, they are malleable. Strategic management theories emphasizing
rationality and optimization as the central premise look implausible to organizational
researchers because they ignore findings on how organizational processes and human
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judgment affect decisions. The reality is that organizations can often be shown to make smart
choices if the researcher considers how their decision makers understand the world.
The modern synthesis of organization theory and strategy is that problem and
opportunity discovery by internal decision makers directs strategic change. This definition is
the root of a broad variety of important research projects, including the creation of
modification of problems and opportunities, the focus on external versus internal problems
and opportunities, the selection of decision makers and their relative influence on the
decision, and their ability to direct strategic change. Although much is already known about
these topics, their importance for organizational strategy and the wide areas still not explored
ensures that the organizational view of strategy has many research opportunities.
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