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Planning to improvise? The role of reasoning in the strategy process: evidence from Malaysia

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-05-26, 12:59 authored by Paul Hughes, Ian HodgkinsonIan Hodgkinson, Darwina A. Arshad, Mathew Hughes, Vitor Leone
Planning and improvisation are depicted as alternate decision-making orientations in the strategy process literature, executed by two parallel cognitive contexts: rational or intuitive, but can rationality and intuition be harmonised in the strategy process? Strategic managers may not have to choose to either plan or improvise, rather there is a need to shift the focus of research from such trade-offs to paradoxical thinking. Drawing on survey data from Malaysian research-intensive firms, we investigate how strategy develops through managers’ strategic reasoning under key external (market turbulence) and internal (centralisation, manager level) contingencies. In contrast to common assumptions in the management literature, we find that both rational and intuitive reasoning can drive planning and improvisation for firms in emerging economies, with additional positive moderation effects under centralisation and manager level. Firms that achieve high levels of both planning and improvisation concurrently are characterised by significantly greater rationality relative to the high planning group and the high improvisation group. The findings extend strategy process research, highlighting how firms in emerging economies differ from theory derived from developed economies.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Asia Pacific Journal of Management

Volume

35

Issue

2

Pages

449–470

Citation

HUGHES, P. ... et al, 2017. Planning to improvise? The role of reasoning in the strategy process: evidence from Malaysia. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 35 (2), pp.449–470.

Publisher

© Springer

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-05-17

Publication date

2017-07-10

Copyright date

2018

Notes

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Asia Pacific Journal of Management. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10490-017-9524-1.

ISSN

0217-4561

eISSN

1572-9958

Language

  • en