SELLING ISSUES TO TOP MANAGEMENT
探讨组织成员如何向高层管理者推销议题,以影响其时间和注意力的分配,从向上影响、主张行为和印象管理三个理论视角构建分析框架,并提出可检验的研究命题。
The time and attention of top management in an organization are critical, but limited, resources. This article develops insights on issue selling as a process that is central to explaining how and where top management allocates its time and attention. We see issue selling as a critical activity in the early stages of organizational decision-making processes. We first clarify the value of understanding issue selling at the individual and organizational levels and from both symbolic and instrumental perspectives. We then develop a framework for describing and studying issue selling in organizations that draws on three different theoretical perspectives: issue selling as upward influence, issue selling as claiming behaviors, and issue selling as impression management. We use the different perspectives to develop a set of testable research propositions. The article concludes with a discussion of practical and theoretical implications of the issue-selling framework.