Resumo

Determinants of strategic inertia span over multiple levels, such as industry (Hannan & Freeman, 1984), organization (Tripsas & Gavetti, 2000), group/team (Hodgkinson & Wright, 2002), and individual (Eggers & Kaplan, 2009). At the team and individual levels, three main determinants have been examined: cognitions, power (disputes), and emotions; however, the field still lacks an integrated analysis of the interplay of these possible causes, which have frequently been investigated separately. Besides, organizational communication plays a critical role.

We draw from the literature in order to briefly present how cognitions, power, and emotions can individually influence top management team’s strategic inertia, and then we discuss their (pairwise) interaction. We contribute to the literature on the determinants of strategic inertia by discussing how organizational communication affects (and is affect by) the manifestations of each of those determinants and thereby influences strategic inertia. Finally, we advance a tentative model of the interactions, which shall benefit from more conceptual refinement and empirical scrutiny.

Top managers are boundedly rational (Cyert & March, 1963; Simon, 1947), nonetheless they need to absorb, process and disseminate information about environments that are extremely complex and ambiguous (Walsh, 1995). Top managers’ emotions could act as inhibitors or enablers of their ability to answer to the challenges of inertia in strategic thinking and adaptive behavior (Hodgkinson & Healey, 2011; 2014). Strategic decision-making frequently includes the political pursuit and negotiation of different interests among the members involved (Kaplan, 2011).

Previous empirical research has frequently presented these three causes – that is, cognition, power and emotion – in isolation or at most in pairs, as cognition and power, power and emotion, or cognition and emotion. Cognition and emotions are entangled (Elfenbein, 2007), political and power games will elicit emotions, which will also influence the interpretation and evaluation of the interests involved within the dominant coalition. Then it is suggested that isolating the variables will not account for the whole story.

Strategy formulation has been portrayed as rational, logical and analytical. However, strategy making (and strategy execution) in practice suffers from limits to human cognitive rationality and is also embedded in behavioral, power-driven, and emotion-laden contexts. Besides, interaction among top decision-makers by means of their communication practices and tools can work both ways, either reinforcing the deleterious impact of team and individual-level determinants of strategic inertia or else attenuating them.

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