Shifting gears: Enabling change in corporate aggressiveness

Abstract

This paper interprets the corporate strategies of multi‐business firms as patterns in their aggregate deployment of resources to functional uses across businesses. By integrating business and corporate levels in the study of strategy‐making, such a perspective facilitates analyzing aggressiveness in corporate posture as a concept distinct from, but complementary to, competitive strategy and diversification. Changes in aggressiveness, we argue, result from the interplay of two sets of forces: (1) inhibitors that create inertia; and (2) inductors that stimulate redeployments. Specific hypotheses are tested using data drawm from a random sample of 352 firms in ten economic sectors between 1977 and 1984. Results support the view that prior performance and sector volatility have a curvilinear impact on the propensity of firms to change their corporate aggressiveness. Change in corporate posture is significantly inhibited by size and prior resource deployments. However, the inductive forces of prior performance and volatility act to stimulate change.

New CEO Openness to Change and Strategic Persistence: The Moderating Role of Industry Characteristics

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Exploration and exploitation within and across intra-organisational domains and their reactions to firm-level failure

“…Students of performance feedback theory have generally argued for a positive relationship between failure and subsequent exploration orientation. Organisations that experienced failure are deemed more likely to reorient than organisations that experienced success (Fombrun and Ginsberg 1990;Ginsberg 1988). They respond to poor performance by making a broad range of strategic and operational changes (Audia and Greve 2006;Bolton 1993;Greve 2003).…”

The influence of local search and performance heuristics on new design introduction in a new product market

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