26.05.2024Contribution to the Strategic Management Society Explorer

Have you seen Violetta Splitter's, David Seidl's, and Richard Whittington's contribution to The Strategic Management Society Explorer already? It is called "Cultivating Inclusion: The Road To Effective Open Strategy In Modern Organizations."

If not, make sure to dive into this short distillation or even the full open-access paper over the Pentecost weekend.

Link to page

It is based on their paper titled: "Getting heard? How employees learn to gain senior management attention in inclusive strategy processes"

Link to paper

Abstract: Recent trends toward inclusive strategy processes raise the issue of how employees acquire the discursive competence necessary to gain senior management attention. Building on the emergent dynamic attention-based view's (DABV) emphasis on communicative interaction, we ethnographically track an inclusive strategy process in a large insurance company. We find that employees typically failed to gain CEO attention because they lacked the discursive competence to integrate their operational knowledge with the CEO's corporate themes. Employees acquired this competence by both experiential and vicarious learning. The CEO promoted employee learning more effectively by specific coaching than by generic coaching. We contribute primarily to the DABV by showing how interactions are sites for learning as well as communications and that communication channels can be both expandable and transparent.