Managing Organizational Legitimacy through Modes of Open Strategizing

Abstract

Extant literature associates the central purpose of open strategizing with organizations seeking to manage legitimacy (e.g. Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007; Whittington, Cailluet & Yakis-Douglas, 2011; Dobusch, Dobusch & Muller-Seitz, 2017). To date, legitimacy has been highlighted as a potential 'effect' (Gegenhuber & Dobusch, 2017) or 'outcome' (Luedicke, Husemann, Furnari & Ladstaetter, 2017) of strategic openness. Absent has been research attempting to understand open strategy as a process of legitimation (Uberbacher, 2014), and there remains a need to elevate the potential of open strategy for managing legitimacy further. To address this gap, the research presented here adopts a longitudinal, single case analysis to explore a professional association who developed a new four-year strategic plan using an open strategy approach. The findings indicate how open strategy dynamics represent the case organization switching between distinct approaches to legitimation, to manage competing stakeholder demands. The research offers an important contribution by accentuating the principal relevance of organizational legitimacy in open strategizing. This brings open strategy into close alignment with organizational legitimacy literature and its theoretical

Open strategizing and organizational resilience considering the environmental uncertainty

“…These practices (Morton et al, 2018) enable views not previously considered (Dobusch et al, 2017;Lavarda et al, 2020;Whittington, 2011) to overcome the period of crisis, and we can understand this inclusion from the organizational flexibility arising from the abundance of resources (Burnard et al, 2018). Thus, we understand that the learning acquired by managers enables internal discussions between the different hierarchical levels of an organization, which favors the generation of solutions to react to environmental uncertainties.…”

“…Moreover, during uncertain periods, strategy making at the micro level allows the inclusion of various organizational actors in strategy making through more or less participatory actions (Dobusch et al, 2017). Based on Morton et al (2018), these actions of inclusion refer to moral legitimation, and it is possible to interpret them as feedback (less participation) or collaboration (more participation), favoring…”

“…Additionally, the characteristic of organizational rigidity is also incompatible with the phenomenon of open strategizing, since with the absence of inclusion and transparency, the actions, interactions, and negotiations among the organizational actors become null, that is, organizational rigidity makes it difficult or impossible to open the strategy. This reflection occurs based on the transmission practice of Morton et al (2018), considering that, in this practice of open strategizing, the strategy is legitimized through pragmatism, that is, it only passes on the information already defined to the other actors.…”

“…Furthermore, control is reduced by the discourse of strategy openness. Also, regarding these two forms of open strategizing practices, in feedback, one-way dialogues occur, while in the collaborative form, discussions have a greater degree of freedom (Morton et al, 2018). The action practice also relates to the transparency dimension, through adaptive legitimation.…”

“…The action practice also relates to the transparency dimension, through adaptive legitimation. It is important to highlight that action as an open strategizing practice evaluates and implements new strategies through its legitimation strategy for adapting to stakeholders' wishes (Morton et al, 2018).…”