Drawing from visionary leadership and strategy process research, we theorize and test the mechanism through which middle and lower-level managers’ visionary leadership affects their teams’ strategic commitment. The management literature extols the virtues of visionary leadership. In contrast to this positive stance, we reveal a dark side to visionary leadership. Our theoretical framework suggests that team manager visionary leadership harms team strategic consensus when the manager is not strategically aligned with the CEO, which in turn diminishes team commitment to the strategy. In contrast, when a team manager is strategically aligned with the CEO, team manager visionary leadership is positively related to team strategic consensus and subsequently to team strategic commitment. Data from 136 teams from two organizations support our moderated mediation model. A supplemental analysis of the content of strategic consensus and additional qualitative interviews with managers and employees in one of these organizations provide additional insights concerning the meaning of the theorized relations in practice.

Research on strategic consensus focuses primarily on the extent of agreement among team members regarding organizational strategy. It does not include elements such as the content of the agreement, between-group consensus, or the significance of differences in consensus (e.g., for evaluating the effectiveness of strategic interventions). We propose a new analytical approach, Strategic Consensus Mapping, that provides a comprehensive analysis of strategic consensus within and between groups and that includes intuitive and easy-to-understand visualizations. This approach offers researchers the necessary tools for integrative theory building in strategic consensus, as well as in the broader managerial and organizational cognition domain. Using a case example, we illustrate the proposed methods for a multidimensional, multilevel, and longitudinal analysis of strategic consensus.

Research on social identification in organizations is diverse and evolving. As focus has shifted to the effects of multiple identities, there is a need to further define relationships between the three primary work identification targets (i.e., team, organization, and profession) and outcomes, specifically as to how each identification target explains variance in outcomes simultaneously. We meta-analytically test the relationship between each identification target and fifteen attitudes, three behaviors, and five general well-being variables at work with 483 studies and 557 independent samples (N = 179,442). We then provide evidence for the relative importance of each identification target through meta-analytic relative weights and regression analysis. Categorizing attitudes according to the same level (team, organization, profession), we found that organizational and team identification were most important in predicting "matching" attitudes, in support of the identity-matching principle. For professional-focused attitudes, behaviors, and general well-being, results were less clear; each identity target explained a range of variance in outcomes. There was a trend of team identification being the most important predictor, particularly for wellbeing. Through meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM), we tested the self-esteem hypothesis from social identity theory; results show that effects from identification to outcomes transmitted through self-esteem were weaker than direct effects.

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Implementing strategy demands an organizationwide effort, where teams should not operate in isolation. A challenge many organizations face in implementing their strategy is eradicating silo thinking and creating shared understanding of strategy between interdependent teams—that is, intergroup strategic consensus. However, strategy process research is silent on how such intergroup strategic consensus can emerge. Drawing on social identity theory, we offer a lens to understand what influences the degree of intergroup strategic consensus. We unveil a tension between organizational and group identification such that organizational identification enhances intergroup strategic consensus, whereas group identification reduces it. Moreover, we hypothesize that high group identification crowds out positive effects of organizational identification on intergroup strategic consensus. Data from 451 intergroup relationships between 92 teams within a service organization support these hypotheses. We replicate our results using 191 intergroup relationships between 37 teams from another organization. These results allow us to develop an understanding of intergroup strategic consensus, expand the conversation in strategy process research to between-team interdependencies, and challenge the assumption in management literature and practice that higher identification is always desirable.