Equivocal Information and Attribution: An Investigation of Patterns of Managerial Sensemaking

Wagner, John A.; Gooding, Richard Z.

doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-0266(199704)18:4<275::aid-smj880>3.0.co;2-v

Cited by 79 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Even though the importance of managerial cognition has been well established (e.g., Tripsas and Gavetti, 2000), how intra-organizational processes shape TMs’ cognition remains insufficiently understood (Gavetti et al, 2012; Eggers and Kaplan, 2013). Previous research has mainly focused on the impact of managerial cognition (e.g., Kaplan, 2008) or individual-level factors that might explain biases (e.g., Wagner and Gooding, 1997). Our inductive process model advances a social–emotional interaction view by describing how emotion-laden TM–MM interactions influenced the content of information conveyed to TMs and shaped their cognition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributed Attention and Shared Emotions in the Innovation Process

Vuori

Huy

2015

Administrative Science Quarterly

389

332

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We conducted a qualitative study of Nokia to understand its rapid downfall over the 2005-2010 period from its position as a world-dominant and innovative technology organization. We found that top and middle managers' shared emotions during the smartphone innovation process caused cycles of behaviors that harmed both the process and its outcome. Together, organizational attention structures and historical factors generated various types of shared fear among top and middle managers. Top managers were afraid of external competitors and shareholders, while middle managers were mainly afraid of internal groups, including superiors and peers. Top managers' externally focused fear led them to exert pressure on middle managers without fully revealing the severity of the external threats and to interpret middle managers' communications in biased ways. Middle managers' internally focused fear reduced their tendency to share negative information with top managers, leading top managers to develop an overly optimistic perception of their organization's technological capabilities and neglect long-term investments in developing innovation. Our study contributes to the attention-based view of the firm by describing how distributed attention structures influence shared emotions and how such shared emotions can hinder the subsequent integration of attention, influencing innovation processes and outcomes and resulting in temporal myopia-a focus on short-term product innovation at the expense of long-term innovation development.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributed Attention and Shared Emotions in the Innovation Process

Vuori

Huy

2015

Administrative Science Quarterly

389

332

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“…First, highly politicized and nontransparent contexts prevent learning from crises because necessary information is suppressed (Collinson, 1999; Roux-Dufort, 2000). Managers who have to take responsibility when big failures occur may attribute these events to external factors, which in turn make them unlikely to learn anything (Starbuck, 2009; Wagner & Gooding, 1997). Attributing big failures to external causes allows managers to avoid accountability; therefore, managers are less motivated to evaluate and diagnose their own actions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Firms Learn More From Small or Big Successes and Failures? A Test of the Outcome-Based Feedback Learning Perspective

Gong¹,

Xia²

2017

Journal of Management

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It has been recognized that previous experiences can provide different types of feedback. However, it has not been systematically explored why firms are more likely to learn effectively from certain types of experience than others. From a feedback-based learning perspective, we argue that it is useful not only to focus on feedback valence (success or failure experiences) but also to examine feedback saliency (the magnitude of the experience’s influence). Based on a sample of acquisitions by U.S. firms, our results indicate that a firm’s success experience drives up the premium that it pays for a subsequent acquisition, whereas a failure experience reduces this subsequent premium. Moreover, we find that the magnitude of the effects of the four types of experiences—small failure, big failure, small success, and big success—does not follow a symmetrical pattern of inverse effects.

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“…Despite this perspective Fredland and Morris [1976] do concede that recognition of the differences between endogenous and exogenous causes (as discussed in Section 3.3) of business failure facilitates further clarification of the phenomena. As noted by Wagner, III and Gooding [1997], to understand failure events we must determine the cause of those failures.…”

Section: Causes Of Failurementioning

confidence: 99%