Individual and organizational antecedents to strategic-issue interpretation

Bård Kuvaas and Geir Kaufmann

Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2004, vol. 20, issue 3, 245-275

Abstract: Although considerable "face validity" attaches to the notion that managerial cognition has a powerful effect on issue interpretation, related research has suggested that the role of individual-level characteristics has little significance. In the study reported below, however, we found that managerial cognitive complexity has an independent impact on data search but not, as prior research has indicated, on the interpretation of threats and opportunities, where factors such as organizational scanning and organization size have a more important predictive role. Taken together these findings suggest that the psychological context arising from organizational factors, and homogeneity of managers' cognitive representations of environmental threats and opportunities, exert a greater influence on the interpretation of threats and opportunities than do individual managerial characteristics.

Keywords: Strategic; issue; diagnosis; Issue; interpretation; Cognitive; complexity; Organization; size; Organizational; scanning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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