The top manager and his team : opening the black box of top management team dynamics in strategic issue diagnosis

How is it that some potentially strategic issues find themselves on a Rim's strategic agenda, while others do not? Why is a top manager more attentive to some aspects of his firm's strategic situation than to others? What shapes his interpretation of his firm's strategic reality? How does strategic issue diagnosis (SID) actually take place within a top management team? These are the types of questions that this thesis addresses. It contends that the way strategy formation in general and SID in particular have so far been studied in top management teams---through essentially cognitive lenses---has been inadequate, largely because these cognitive approaches, although concerned with the biases that affect thinking are themselves based on an incomplete and therefore biased and distorted view of people, their choices and their actions.The findings of a single-case field study that explored strategy formation and SID in a medium-sized entrepreneurial family firm led by a still-active founder are presented. The study utilized an enlarged conceptual framework that combined the dominant cognitive approaches in this domain with certain concepts from dynamic psychology. Its findings show that the deeply-entrenched personal preoccupations of a CEO, shaped by developmental processes and formative experiences throughout his life, and of which his cognitions are only one manifestation, have the potential to profoundly influence his strategic orientations, the top management team (TMT) dynamics in his firm, and consequently SID and its outcomes. It concludes that enriching the dominant cognitive models of SID and strategy formation by incorporating concepts taken from psychodynamic theory (specifically, concepts dealing with the consistent manifestations of individual character in all aspects of an individual's life) can lead to a better understanding of the complex subjective phenomena involved