Cognitive Factions in a Top Management Team: Surfacing and Analyzing Cognitive Diversity using Causal Maps

Cognitive diversity has been shown to positively affect team performance, especially in the early stages of strategic planning. We report on a process that explicitly identifies cognitive factions; sub-groups of individuals with diverse views and beliefs within a top management team (TMT). Our group-driven causal mapping process provides greater clarity to understanding the underlying belief structures of the cognitive factions through the adoption of givens-means-ends (GME) and casual path analysis. We achieve this clarity by having members of the TMT define and agree on the strategic factors before they construct their individual cause maps. Through this process, based on the relationships shared among the team members, we can readily merge individual cause maps into cognitive faction maps. By employing GME and casual path analysis to the cognitive faction maps, we can surface the differences in beliefs among the different cognitive factions within the TMT. We demonstrate our process using a 13-person TMT from an information technology services firm. The cause maps of the cognitive factions directly represent some of the issues and assumptions that need to be discussed and debated among the members of the TMT, thus increasing the potential for cognitive faction beliefs to enhance decision-making. We also find that cognitive factions relate to task roles of the team members, providing further evidence that different beliefs develop in different areas of the organization.     

A Multi-Agent View of Strategic Planning Using Group Support Systems and Artificial Intelligence

The strategic planning process is dynamic and complex. Including a Group Support System (GSS) in the problem-solving process can improve the content quality of the strategic plan by allowing increased participation by more members of the organization. However, it can also add to the complexity of the problem by increasing the quantity of textual information that can result from group activity. Added complexity increases cognitive overload and frustrations of those participants negotiating the contents of the strategic plan. This article takes a multi-agent view of the strategic planning process. It considers group participants as multiple agents concerned with the content quality of the strategic plan. The facilitator agent is responsible for guiding groups in the strategic plan construction process as well as for solving process problems such as cognitive overload. We introduce an AI Concept Categorizer agent, a software tool that supports the facilitator in addressing the process problem of cognitive overload associated with convergent group activities by synthesizing group textual output into conceptual clusters. The implementation of this tool reduces frustrations which groups encounter in the process of classifying textual output and provides more time for discussion of the concepts themselves. Because of the large amount of convergent activity necessary for strategic planning, the addition of the AI Concept Categorizer to the strategic planning process should increase the quality of the strategic plan and the buy-in of the participants in the strategic planning process.     

De-Fusing Organizational Power Using Anonymity and Cognitive Factions in a Participative Strategic Planning Setting

When an organization is facing disruptive change or the need for new capabilities to fit new conditions, the creation of a democratic strategic plan can be useful. However, strategic plans typically only reflect the beliefs and values of their architects; not all stakeholders. To include the beliefs of all stakeholders requires a participative environment. Due to the potential deleterious effects that organizational power may have in a participative setting, anonymity and cognitive factions is proposed to reduce the possible negative effects associated with power in a participative strategic planning setting. Group support systems have been shown to protect relationships and retain the social order in these settings. In this specific case, through the use of a group support system that supports anonymity and cognitive faction identification, we found that the sources of power typically found and used to drive group decisions in an academic setting did not drive the content of the strategic plan.     

A‐pool: An agent‐oriented open system shell for distributed decision process modeling

An agent‐oriented open system shell, A‐Pool, for distributed decision process modeling in the Internet domain is presented. Unlike most decision support systems, A‐Pool provides a testbed for modeling and understanding the cognitive aspects of distributed decision processes themselves rather than for domain‐specific problem solving. This is achieved with a pool of virtual agents and a pool of cognitive maps of the agents at each A‐Pool node. The virtual agent scheme extends object‐oriented programming to the Internet domain and supports different communication and collaboration protocols with virtual communities, virtual sessions, and virtual conferences. The cognitive map scheme supports perspective sharing and various conflict integration and resolution strategies through cognitive map composition, derivation, and focus generation. Thus each A‐Pool node provides an architecture for modeling interdependencies and for ensuring global coherence; in addition, the communication is asynchronous and the control is distributed, allowing a large degree of autonomy and the examination of various thoughts and social protocols involved in strategic planning in an open system environment. Basic ideas are illustrated with a running example.     

Training strategic thinking: Experimental evidence

Strategic behavior is crucial for strong firm performance, especially in competitive environments. Thus, designing a good strategy is a key issue for firms. Designing a strategy requires a combination of strategic thinking—which involves analyzing a firm's strategic environment, defining a vision of its future, and devising new ideas to out-think competitors – and strategic planning – which implies using these ideas to formulate a business plan. Although many firms excel at strategic planning, few devote enough resources to strategic thinking, which results in strategic insanity (i.e., firms repeatedly applying the same strategies with the expectation of different outcomes). To foster a strategic environment within a firm, firm managers and other workers must show willingness for active involvement in a firm's strategic decisions. Nevertheless, not everybody has the skills to do so, as many firms lack work force training programs. This study shows, experimentally, how training affects firms' strategic behavior. The starting point is two groups of individuals with initially equal qualifications who play in a sequential game whose rules hinder the calculation of equilibria. The members of only one of the groups previously receive a treatment entailing a process of training and learning that aims at fostering strategic thinking. The results point to a significant increase in the number of strategic decisions in the treatment group in sharp contrast to the control group, confirming the initial hypothesis (i.e., the positive impact of training).     

Collaborative Decision-Making in Non-formal Planning Settings

Planning initiatives outside the formal planning system can constitute a favourable environment for implementing and analysing collaborative decision-making processes. The conceptualisation of the decision-making context in the light of the Policy Network analysis helps to better understand the underlining conditions, as well as their influence in the outcomes. In the case under analysis, were the decision-making conditions were of co-responsibility and power-sharing, the challenge has been to warrant the effectiveness of the decisions, which lies, as is argued, in the reliability of the framework for decision-making and in the ability to translate the collaborative participation outputs into actions at different time-frames. Moreover, as the case-study deals with strategic spatial planning, a future oriented approach is needed to warrant the flexibility and robustness of the plan in addressing the uncertainty associated with long term objectives. Those are the critical issues to be handled in the multi-criteria analysis (MCA) framework which sustains the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) that was used to support the decision-making process.     

Predictors of satisfaction with the succession process in family firms

Recent theoretical developments suggest that satisfaction with the succession process in family firms is enhanced by the incumbent's propensity to step aside, the successor's willingness to take over, agreement among family members to maintain family involvement in the business, acceptance of individual roles, and succession planning. Data from incumbent leaders and successors provide strong support for these relationships. Incumbents and successors disagree, however, about the importance of each other's role. This implies a need to align these strategic stakeholders' perceptions in the family firm. Our research methodology also highlights the importance of considering multiple stakeholder groups in conducting family firm research.     

Due Process Procedures in Faculty Grievance Codes

The purpose of this paper is to analyze what some private universities are doing in the area of mediation and other alternative ways of solving faculty complaints – what some term "alternative dispute resolution." Special attention will be given to one of the most important ethical issues in this area at the operating level of individual universities – the due process procedures with respect to the processing of the grievances of individual faculty members in nonunionized colleges. The paper concludes with recommendations for university administrators and faculty senates, as well as recommendations for future research.     

STRATEGIC SUPPLY CHAIN MAPPING APPROACHES

There are a number of compelling reasons to build a strategic supply chain map. However, widely accepted conventions for this kind of mapping do not yet exist. The strategic map provides a tool for linking corporate strategy to supply chain strategy and for helping to manage and modify the supply chain structure. Before the discipline addresses the process of building strategic supply chain maps, there is a need for mapping conventions and a framework for categorizing strategic supply chain maps.     

The spatial knowledge of retail decision makers: capturing and interpreting group insight using a composite cognitive map

The paper argues that existing techniques for retail site evaluation ignore the useful "soft" insights of retail executives. It outlines a technique for constructing a composite map of retail decision makers' insights into the location influences affecting store performance. It has two objectives: to show how the method can be used to construct a basic knowledge base by helping to elicit decision makers' spatial knowledge; and to clarify the status of the maps in terms of the process of group decision making. Illustrations are given from current work drawn from interviews with executives of a major multiple superstore retailer in the UK. The paper shows how composite mapping provides a means to reduce the ideas of a group without any loss of detail, using key cognitive constructs as a "glue" to provide a template against which individual maps can be compared and better understood. The interpretative method provides a flexible and expedient means for constructing an organizational knowledge base for site location - the value of which can then be tested for modelling purposes - and as an effective counterweight to normative procedures.     

A Perspective on Marketing Planning and Its Essentiality for the Entrepreneurial Restaurateur

ABSTRACT

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the essentiality of a marketing plan for a small restaurant and offer a framework for its development. Though much has been written on the subject of strategic marketing and marketing planning, little is directed specifically to the entrepreneur operating an independent restaurant establishment. The purpose of this paper is to help bridge this gap. Sample marketing plan excerpts are presented and discussed at the conclusion of the paper demonstrating how the process can be implemented.     

Best practices to increase racial diversity in business schools: What actually works according to a nationwide survey of business schools

Many scholarly works have identified potential strategies for hiring underrepresented minority faculty members. However, no known nationwide study of business schools has explored whether these various strategies are associated with more faculty diversity. The authors explored best practices in corporations and higher education in the following areas: diversity priorities, strategic planning, outreach to underrepresented minority communities, administrative structures, and diversity training. The nationwide survey of business school deans showed that authority structures, which have proven to work in business, also are effective in academia. Similar to business results, training programs by themselves do not seem to be effective in increasing diversity.     

The Reverse Logistic Process of an Automobile Supply Chain Network Supported by a Collaborative Decision-Making Model

Decision system technologies have long since been a strong support to model and solve planning complexities in the supply chain in a collaborative context. Moreover, one of the main topics to emerge is reverse logistics, which is becoming more relevant in supply chains in terms of the logistics process of removing new or used products from their initial point. Therefore, to present the main aspects that should be considered to share the decision information, which is already used among the members of the supply chain, a study of reverse logistics has been carried out to discover how decision-making activities support the process in supply chains. Furthermore, a simulation experiment has been performed with both the DGRAI 3.0 tool and Rockwell Arena 11^® to observe the quality evolution of decision making and the economical impact that the proposed collaborative model will have on the current system. Moreover, this research work shows that a clear impact will appear on the decisional quality at the bottom levels of the supply chain than on the decisional quality of the whole system. The main work hypothesis is that the logistic process costs must lower given the implementation of the proposed collaborative model.     

Individual Priming in Virtual Team Decision-Making

Virtual teams have different interactions than face-to-face teams because they rely on information and communication technologies, which can impede or assist certain human cognitive processes. Past research has shown that although virtual teams exchange more information than face-to-face teams, poor decisions often result, because team members do not consider the unique information they receive from others. Drawing from cognitive psychology, our research explored a unique way to improve team decision-making through the use of cognitive priming. We proposed that priming group members to pay attention to others or to engage in counterfactual thinking would improve team members’ cognition and, therefore, team performance. Prior research with individuals and brainstorming teams has shown these forms of priming to improve performance; however, no research has attempted to use priming to improve the outcomes of virtual team decision-making, which requires deeper interaction and cognitive involvement than brainstorming. We performed two lab experiments using primes that have been found to improve the individual decision-making process. We found that priming had some impact, but it did not significantly improve decision quality. Various reasons are discussed to explain why priming techniques may not be as powerful in teams as in individuals, and future research ideas are suggested to build on our initial work on priming in virtual team decision-making.     

Bridging Industrial Segmentation Theory and Practice

Purpose: Segmentation is seen today as a core concept within mainstream marketing. While industrial segmentation has received considerable attention within academic literature, there have been many reports on companies having problems using, applying, and implementing the principles of segmentation. Authors criticize the literature on segmentation for giving too little attention to implementation, providing marketers little help and guidance on how to make segmentation work in a practical environment. This article addresses some of these problems.

Methodology/Approach: The objective of this article is to design a process with methods and activities for segmentation by building on action research case study data from a large Danish industrial company.

Findings: Along with important considerations, this article presents the process of segmentation using a build-up approach based on qualitative market data. The process is practical and easily approachable for companies. The purpose behind segmentation is strategic—identify target segments and facilitate the planning of future product offers. It is argued that segmentation should be dedicated to the purpose and context of the company. This case illustrates how the company adapted segmentation theory to their particular needs.     

Cognitive Maps and a Hyperknowledge Support System in Strategic Management

Strategic management is defined as the system of action programs which form sustainable competitive advantages for a corporation, its divisions, and its business units in a strategic planning period.We have developed a system called Woodstrat to serve as a support system for these action program activities on both the corporate, the divisional, and the business unit levels. The system is modular and is built around the logic of strategic management, i.e., the main modules cover the market position; the competitive position; the production position; and the profitability, investment, and financing positions. The innovation in Woodstrat is that these modules are linked together, i.e., when a strong market position is built into some market segment, it will have an immediate impact on profitability through links running from the assumptions on an expected development to the projected profit/loss statement. There are similar links making the competitive position interact with the market position, and the production position interact with both the market and the competitive positions, and with the profitability and financing positions.The intermodular links are based on expert knowledge of strategic management; expert knowledge is also worked into the modules such that the logic of strategic management guides the user through the process of working out sustainable competitive advantages. The process is made user-supportive with a hyperknowledge user interface. The support is made intuitive and effective with the use of object-oriented expert system technology. The basis for this is rather unusual: the Woodstrat system was built with Visual Basic, in which the objects to create a hyperknowledge environment were built.It is shown that the conceptual constructs which form strategic management can be described with cognitive maps, and that these can be adequately represented with our hyperknowledge objects. It is also shown that the knowledge formation which takes place in a management team when strategic plans are formed can be described and validated with a hyperknowledge support system. It is finally shown that a support system with hyperknowledge features, which are close to the cognitive maps of a management team, will have a profound impact on the depth and the structure of its strategic management processes.     

‘Faculty Members’ Attitudes Towards Ethics at Norwegian Business Schools: An Explorative Study’

A survey of recent research reveals that there is a growing interest in knowledge regarding the opinions and attitudes toward ethics amongst business school faculty members. Based on an empirical study conducted in Norway we address the following issue: “What do faculty members of the Norwegian Business Schools consider to be their responsibilities in preparing their students for leading positions in public and private organizations?” Moving on to interpreting the results from the survey, we discuss the empirical findings by comparing the data using four different theoretical perspectives; neo-classical economics, strategic management, corporate social responsibility and socio-economics. The implications are highlighted.     

Marketing Plans or Marketing Planning?

The standard textbook model of marketing planning starts with strategic analysis, leading to marketing objectives and strategy formulation, action programmes, implementation, and control. The empirical study reported here suggests that while many practitioners apparently aspire to use this model, few use it as prescribed. In particular, few firms included specific action programmes for the marketing mix or any forecasts of competitors'strategies. At the individual firm level there was also some mismatch between the contents of the plan and the intended benefits of planning. Whether or not they produced an explicit annual marketing plan, most firms'planning behaviour consisted mainly of extensive budgeting combined with limited strategic analysis. The main thesis is that the standard model of marketing planning aims to achieve too much and may even be counter-productive as well as time-wasting and energy-sapping. A simpler and more action orientated model is proposed.     

The Effects of Integrating Cognitive Feedback and Multi-attribute Utility-Based Multicriteria Decision-Making Methods in GDSS

Cognitive conflicts arise within groups because the members of a group view a problem from different perspectives, even when they have similar interests in achieving a goal. Disagreement within a group may occur due to: (a) differing judgment policies among the members, (b) inconsistency by any member in using a judgment policy, (c) group process losses that prevent group members from understanding each other better, or (d) limited processing capability which may prevent group members from processing all information effectively. Disagreement is especially likely when policies, processes, or information are conflicting in nature.A level 2 GDSS to aid judging in cognitive conflict tasks is presented that combines cognitive feedback and Multi-attribute utility (MAU) theory based multicriteria decision-making techniques with the communication structure and activity-structuring capabilities of a level 1 GDSS. Though cognitive feedback and MAU methods have been used separately to help groups resolve cognitive conflicts, never before have the two decision aids been used together in a computer-based collaborative system.The contributory effects of the components of this GDSS design were empirically tested in a laboratory setting. Three treatments: an unaided face-to-face meeting, a level 1 GDSS supported meeting, and a level 2 GDSS supported meeting were compared in a repeated measures experimental design.Results largely supported the proposed research hypotheses. Some specific findings include: (1) the level 2 GDSS reduced disagreement between group members and improved consistency of judgments better than the other meeting environments did; (2) there was no significant difference in the reduction of disagreement between the level 1 GDSS and face-to-face meetings; and (3) while there was no difference in improvement of consistency of individual judgments between the face-to-face and level 1 GDSS supported meetings, group judgments made in face-to-face meetings were more consistent.     

Strategic marketing planning for heritage tourism: a conceptual model and empirical findings from two emerging heritage regions

This paper examines the process of strategic marketing planning for heritage tourism, an inherently complex and fragmented system, requiring a coordinated approach among a range of stakeholders. A conceptual model, detailing key stakeholders and specific strategic functions, as well as a prescribed method of coordination, is presented. Two regions were investigated using a qualitative methodology, which examined five strategic documents and consisted of in-depth interviews with 11 key informants from the tourism industry. Key findings indicate that weak coordination, in terms of strategic marketing planning, has negative implications for heritage tourism marketing concerning four key strategic functions, strategic orientation, resource allocation, product service development and destination promotion. The paper emphasises the importance of strategic marketing planning for each function and considers the role of the public sector in terms of providing strategic direction. Furthermore, the paper highlights the potential difficulties of engaging in heritage tourism development in a non-traditional destination.