Flexibility in Strategic Decision Making: Informational and Ideological Perspectives
研究了战略决策过程中灵活性的影响因素，从信息处理和意识形态两个视角提出假设，并在25家公司的57个战略决策中检验，发现竞争威胁、冗余资源和不确定性有助于理解灵活性，但管理者在最需要灵活性的条件下反而最不灵活。
Adaptation is a crucial challenge for organizations, and an important theme in the strategy and organization theory literature. We still have much to learn, however, about the strategic processes by which adaptation is achieved. In this paper we focus on a basic element in the adaptation process, i.e. flexibility within the strategic decision‐making process. We concentrate on strategic decisions because these choices are the most important adaptations the firm makes. We suggest that the core of all organizational adaptation is a decision‐making process. Unless the decision‐making process itself is flexible, it is unlikely the organization can be flexible enough to adapt. We derive hypotheses concerning the factors that lead to flexibility (versus rigidity) from both information processing and ideological perspectives, and test them in a study involving 57 strategic decisions in 25 companies. Our results identify three contextual factors related to both perspectives ‐‐ including competitive threat, slack and uncertainty ‐‐ that are helpful in understanding flexibility in strategy decision making. While managers appear to be more flexible when decisions are uncertain, we found that in the very conditions where managers need the most flexibility (high competitive threat and low slack), they are least likely to be flexible.