Behavioral Strategy: Strategic Consensus, Power and Networks

textabstractOrganizations are embedded in a network of relationships and make sense of their business environment through the cognitive frames of their employees and executives who constantly experience battles for power. This dissertation integrates strategic management research with organizational behavior to illuminate managerial cognition, intra-organizational power and interfirm networks. The collection of the studies presented in the present dissertation provides further insights into measurement of cognition, consensus formation process, optimal power differences, and social network theory with assumptions grounded on social cognition, behavioral decision theory, psychology and organizational behavior. These studies offered a new method to measure, visualize and aggregate individual cognition to group and between group level with a strong emphasis on multiple dimensions of cognition, shed light on micro-processes on consensus formation in relation to within-group power differences and psychological safety, a novel model of strategic decision making, and a new behavioral construct that refined existing theories from a behavioral perspective. Each study on its own laid down responses to core research questions of behavioral strategy. Consequently, this dissertation extends strategic management along behavioral lines and equips scholars and practitioners with novel methods and theoretical insights with respect to cognition, power and networks