I explore what happens when senior executives try to include non-expert, functional managers in the formulation and implementation of strategic actions marked by high levels of complexity and uncertainty. My findings will hopefully be relevant for anybody struggling to introduce new organizational practices in potentially hostile or sceptical corporate environments. They should be especially interesting for researchers who investigate open strategy, firms’ political actions, and institutional logics at a micro-foundational level.
04:17
When time is of the essence and teams face unexpected contextual changes, they must adapt quickly, sometimes even in real time, that is, they may have to improvise. This paper adopts an inductive approach to explore how teams decide to engage in improvised adaptation, and what happens during those processes for improvisation to be successful. The study analyzes improvisation from the perspective of paradox
theory and identifies six paradoxical tensions driven by these contexts: deployment, development, temporal, procedural, structural, and behavioral tensions. We propose a dynamic equilibrium model of team improvised adaptation that leads to team plasticity.
- Research
- Innovation Management