Antecedents and temporal dynamics of strategic divergence in multinational corporations: Evidence from Europe

Matthias Brauer and Mark Heitmann

Journal of World Business, 2013, vol. 48, issue 1, 110-121

Abstract: Coordinating consistent strategy implementation has been identified a key challenge for multi-national corporations. Based on intraorganizational evolutionary models of strategy formation, this paper thus empirically investigates the antecedents and temporal dynamics of strategic divergence. Strategic divergence is the deviation of a firm's resource allocation decisions with its articulated concept of corporate strategy. Large-scale empirical analysis of 11,406 resource allocation decisions of twenty-five publicly listed, multi-national and multi-business European firms indicates that decision type, operational and divisional manager involvement in decision making and structural context changes exert a significant influence on strategic divergence. Importantly, results further suggest that firms’ levels of strategic divergence tend to increase over time and that the antecedents of strategic divergence have a differential impact as time passes.

Keywords: Strategic divergence; Intraorganizational evolutionary process of strategy formation; Strategic intent in multi-national corporations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:worbus:v:48:y:2013:i:1:p:110-121

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DOI: 10.1016/j.jwb.2012.06.012

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