Home < Followership < Leadership Challenge
Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer:
The Leadership Challenge
By
Michael A. Roberto
Part 4 of 4
End Notes
1. Many scholars have drawn this distinction between decisions
that are quite novel, ill-structured, ambiguous, and highly consequential and
those that are more routine, well-defined, and tactical in nature. For instance,
see H. Simon. (1960). The New Science of Management Decision. New York: Harper &
Row; P. Drucker. (1967). The Effective Executive. New York: Harper & Row; F.
Harrison. (1996). The Managerial Decision-Making Process, Fourth Edition.
Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. For an example of researchers who define strategic
decisions in a manner similar to the approach employed in this book, see K. Eisenhardt and L. J. Bourgeois. (1988). “The politics of strategic decision
making in high-velocity environments: Toward a midrange theory,”
Academy of
Management Journal. 31(4): p. 737–770.
2. Henry Mintzberg and his colleagues conducted a landmark study
in 1976 that documented the dynamic, iterative, and discontinuous nature of many
strategic decision-making processes. See H. Mintzberg, D. Raisinghani, and A.
Theoret. (1976). “The structure of 'unstructured' decision processes,”
Administrative Science Quarterly. 21: p. 246–275.
3. N. Tichy and D. Ulrich. (1984). “The leadership challenge—A
call for the transformational leader,” Sloan Management Review. 26(1): p. 63.
4. J. Byrne, L. Lavelle, N. Byrnes, M. Vickers, and A. Borrus.
“How to fix corporate governance,” Business Week, (May 6, 2002), p. 68.
5. Bill Wooldridge and Steven Floyd have defined and
operationalized the construct of consensus as the multiplicative function of
commitment and shared understanding. Their definition, survey instruments, and
measurement methodology have now been used by a number of other scholars. See B.
Wooldridge and S. Floyd. (1990). “The strategy process, middle management
involvement, and organizational performance,” Strategic Management Journal. 11:
231–241. To see how I have measured consensus following a similar methodological
approach, see M. Roberto. (2004). “Strategic decision-making processes: Moving
beyond the efficiency-consensus tradeoff,” Group and Organization Management.
29(6): p. 625–658.
6. A. Amason. (1996). “Distinguishing the effects of functional
and dysfunctional conflict on strategic decision making,” Academy of Management
Journal. 39(1): p. 125.
7. For more on what can happen when organizations achieve
understanding without commitment, or vice versa, see S. Floyd and B. Wooldridge.
(1996). The Strategic Middle Manager: How to Create and Sustain Competitive
Advantage. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
8. J. Krakauer. (1997). Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the
Mount Everest Disaster. New York: Anchor Books. p. 356–357.
9. Many empirical studies have shown that organizational
decision-making processes can be quite diffuse at times, and that they involve
simultaneous activity at multiple levels of the firm. In Joseph Bower's seminal
work on how resource-allocation decisions are made in organizations, he
concluded that “Individual planning and investment decisions are made by
managers at many levels of the firmÉan idea is shaped as it proceeds up
managerial levels until it emerges fully packaged as a request for capital or a
business plan for consideration by corporate management. At the same time, each
level of management influences the ones above and below it.” See J. Bower.
(1970). Managing the Resource Allocation Process. Boston: Harvard Business
School Press. p. 19–20. For more empirical work consistent with Bower's
findings, see R. Burgelman. (1983). “A process model of internal corporate
venturing in the diversified major firm.” Administrative Science Quarterly. 28:
p. 223–244 as well as H. Mintzberg and A. McHugh. (1985). “Strategy formation in
an adhocracy.” Administrative Science Quarterly. 30(2): p. 160–197. An
interesting reflection on the past few decades of research in this stream of
literature can be found in R. Butler, H. Mintzberg, A. Pettigrew, and J. Waters.
(1990). “Studying deciding: An exchange of views between Mintzberg and Waters,
Pettigrew, and Butler.” Organization Studies. 11(1): p. 1–16.
10. G. Allison and P. Zelikow. (1999). Essence of Decision:
Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Second edition. New York: Longman. p. 5. In
Allison's book, he examines the Cuban Missile Crisis using three different
conceptual lenses. The first—the rational actor model—presumes that one can
explain an organization's behavior as the output of the thinking of a rational
individual at the top of the institution. The other two conceptual lenses view
organizational decisions and action as the result of a more complex set of
routines and behaviors involving multiple actors, at different levels, who may
have conflicting goals.
11. See M. Roberto. (2002). "The stable core and dynamic
periphery in top management teams," Management Decision. 41(2): p. 120–131. In
that paper, I provide results from a survey of 78 business-unit presidents at
Fortune 500 firms, as well as from field research at several sites. The data
show that a top management team performs a variety of monitoring and control
functions within most firms, but that a single team with stable composition does
not make strategic choices in most organizations. Instead, different groups,
with members from multiple organizational levels, form to make various strategic
decisions. A stable subset of the top team forms the core of each of these
multiple decision-making bodies.
12. D. Hambrick. (1994). “Top management groups: A conceptual
integration and reconsideration of the team label,” In B. M. Staw and L. L.
Cummings (Eds.) Research in Organizational Behavior. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
172. Hambrick offered this acknowledgment one decade after launching the “upper
echelons” literature, which focuses on the effect of top management team
composition on strategic choices and organizational performance. See D. Hambrick
and P. Mason. (1984). “Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its
top managers,” Academy of Management Review. 9: p. 193–206.
13. J.B. Quinn. (1980). Strategies for Change. Homewood, IL:
Irwin. p. 13.
14. For interesting case studies that demonstrate the critical
role of “offline” activity as it relates to senior management team decision
making, see L. Hill. (1993). “Rudi Gassner and the Executive Committee of BMG
International (A),” Harvard Business School Case No. 494-055, as well as D.
Garvin and M. Roberto. (1997). “Decision-Making at the Top: The All-Star Sports
Catalog Division,” Harvard Business School Case No. 398-061.
15. For a comprehensive overview of cognitive bias research,
see M. Bazerman. (1998). Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. New York: John
Wiley & Sons. To access another useful guide for managers, see J. E. Russo and
P. Schoemaker. (2002). Winning Decisions: Getting It Right the First Time. New
York: Fireside.
16. For more on the sunk-cost trap, see B. Staw and J. Ross.
(1989). “Understanding behavior in escalation situations.” Science. 246: p.
216–220; H. Arkes and C. Blumer. (1985). “The psychology of sunk cost,”
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 35: p. 124–140; J. Brockner. (1992). “The escalation of commitment to a failing course of action,”
Academy of Management Review. 17(1): p. 39–61.
17. Kathleen Eisenhardt and L. Jay Bourgeois found that
political behavior— defined in terms of activities such as withholding of
information and behind-the scenes coalition formation—leads to less-effective
decisions and poorer organizational performance. See K. Eisenhardt and L.J.
Bourgeois. (1988). However, other studies show that certain forms of political
behavior can enhance organizational performance. For instance, Kanter, Sapolsky,
Pettigrew, and Pfeffer each have conducted studies that show that political
activity such as coalition building can prove helpful in building commitment and
securing support for organizational decisions. See R. Kanter. (1983).
Change
Masters. New York: Simon and Schuster; Sapolsky. (1972).
The Polaris System
Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press; A. Pettigrew. (1973). The Politics of Organizational
Decision Making. London: Tavistock; J. Pfeffer. (1992).
Managing with Power.
Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Why the discrepancy in these studies? It
appears that the results will depend on precisely how scholars define politics,
as well as precisely how managers employ political tactics in organizations.
18. In a classic study of more than 200 capital investment
choices, Eberhard Witte found that the decision processes almost never followed
a simple linear progression from problem identification to selection of a course
of action. See E. Witte. (1972). “Field research on complex decision-making
processes—The phase theorem.” International Studies of Management and
Organization. Fall: p. 156–182.
19. Many scholars have drawn this distinction between decisions
that are quite novel, ill-structured, ambiguous, and highly consequential and
those that are more routine, well-defined, and tactical in nature. For instance,
see H. Simon. (1960). The New Science of Management Decision. New York: Harper &
Row; P. Drucker. (1967). The Effective Executive. New York: Harper & Row; F.
Harrison. (1996). The Managerial Decision-Making Process, Fourth Edition.
Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. For an example of researchers who define strategic
decisions in a manner similar to the approach employed in this book, see K. Eisenhardt and L. J. Bourgeois. (1988). “The politics of strategic decision
making in high-velocity environments: Toward a midrange theory,”
Academy of
Management Journal. 31(4): p. 737–770.
20. See A. Langley. (1989). “In search of rationality: The
purposes behind the use of formal analysis in organizations,”
Administrative
Science Quarterly. 34: p. 598–631; M. Feldman and J. March. (1981). “Information
in organizations as signal and symbol,” Administrative Science Quarterly. 26:
171–186.
21. For more on Iacocca and the Ford Mustang story, see R.
Lacey. (1986). Ford: The Men and the Machine. Boston: Little Brown; D. Halberstam. (1986).
The Reckoning. New York: William Morrow; L. Iacocca. (1984).
Iacocca: An Autobiography. Toronto: Bantam Books.
22. See K. Weick. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
23. For more on the emergent nature of strategy formation, see
H. Mintzberg and J. Waters. (1985). “Of strategies, deliberate and emergent,”
Strategic Management Journal. 6(3): p. 257–272.
24. Welch describes this concept of confronting reality in a
video produced at the Harvard Business School that includes a compilation of
Jack Welch speaking to students or being interviewed by HBS professors at a
series of points during his 20-year tenure as CEO of General Electric. See J.
Bower. (2002). Jack Welch Compilation: 1981–2001. Harvard Business School Video.
Welch also describes what he means by dealing with reality in his book. See J.
Welch. (2001). Jack: Straight from the Gut. New York: Warner Business Books.
25. Bower. (1970). p. 305.
26. In her book, Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth
Moss Kanter describes how managers have a tendency to search for subordinates
who are similar to them in many ways, including people with similar outward
appearances. She argued that homogeneity comforts people, in a sense,
particularly during times of uncertainty. See R. Kanter. (1977).
Men and Women
of the Corporation. New York: Basic Books. Many scholars also have argued that
demographic homogeneity may signify a lower level of cognitive diversity within
a firm (i.e., a tendency for more like-minded people). For instance, see D. Hambrick and P. Mason. (1984).
27. For an example of the pressures to not disagree with a
powerful chief executive, one might consider the case of Bill Agee, CEO at
Morris Knudsen in the early 1990s. Brian O'Reilly describes his management style
in great detail in an article for Fortune magazine that appeared in May 1995,
after a year in which Agee's firm lost more than $300 million, largely due to a
flawed decision to move into locomotive and railcar manufacturing. In the
article, O'Reilly quotes a rail company executive commenting on Morris Knudsen's
attempt to move into this new business; that executive describes Agee's direct
reports as “sycophants and yesmen.” See B. O'Reilly. “Agee in exile,”
Fortune.
(May 29, 1995): p. 50–61.
28. Ibid. (1997). p. 190.
29. Ibid. (1997). p. 260.
30. Ibid. (1997). p. 260.
31. Ibid. (1997). p. 245.
32. A. Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt. (1998).
The Climb: Tragic
Ambitions on Everest. New York: St. Martin's. [p. 121].
33. Krakauer. (1997). p. 216.
34. Ibid. (1997). p. 219.
35. Ibid. (1997). p. 265.
36. For a complete conceptual analysis of the 1996 Mount
Everest tragedy, see M. Roberto. (2002). “Lessons from Everest: The interaction
of cognitive bias, psychological safety, and system complexity,”
California
Management Review. 45(1): 136–158. For educators, the events also are detailed
in a teaching case; see M. Roberto and G. Carioggia. (2002). “Mount
Everest—1996,” Harvard Business School Case No. 303-061.
37. A. Grove. (1996). Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit
the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company. New York: Currency-Doubleday. p.
116.
38. See Amason (1996) for a detailed discussion of the
relationship between cognitive and affective conflict, as well as the effect
that these two forms of conflict have on outcomes such as commitment,
understanding, and decision quality.
39. Many people have speculated about cross-cultural
differences with respect to the role of conflict in organizational
decision-making processes. I believe that many of the ideas presented in this
book represent universal principles, but naturally, managers need to apply these
core principles with sensitivity for the cultural settings in which they work.
For instance, many people have wondered whether conflict must be handled
differently in certain countries, such as Japan. I have chosen not to speculate
in this book about cross-cultural differences, given that most of my research
has taken place in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Moreover, other
scholars have not yet arrived at definitive research conclusions with regard to
cross-cultural differences in senior management decision-making. More work needs
to be done in this area.
40. For more on the leadership style of Bill Parcells, see B.
Parcells. (2000). “The tough work of turning around a team,”
Harvard Business
Review. 78(6): p. 179–184.
41. H. Einhorn and R. Hogarth. (1978). “Confidence in judgment:
Persistence in the illusion of validity,” Psychological Review. 85: p. 395–416.
42. For more on overconfidence bias, see S. Lichtenstein, B.
Fischhoff, and L. Phillips. (1982). “Calibration of probabilities: The state of
the art to 1980,” in D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, eds.,
Judgment
Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.
43. B. Staw, L. Sandelands, and J. Dutton. (1981).
“Threat-rigidity effects on organizational behavior,” Administrative Science
Quarterly. 26: p. 501–524.
44. For more on social identity theory and self-categorization
theory, see H. Tajfel. (1978). “Social categorization, social identity, and
social comparison.” In H. Tajfel (ed.). Differentiation Between Social Groups in
the Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. p. 61–76. London: Academic Press;
J. Turner. (1985). “Social categorization and the self-concept: A social
cognitive theory of group behavior.” In E. J. Lawler (ed.).
Advances in Group
Processes: Theory and Research. p. 77–122. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. For a
recent empirical study applying these theories to better understand the impact
of diversity on work groups, see J. Polzer, L. Milton, and W. Swann, Jr. (2002).
“Capitalizing on diversity: Interpersonal congruence in small work groups,”
Administrative Science Quarterly. 47(2): p. 296–324.
45. C. Argyris. (1990). Overcoming Organizational Defenses.
Needham Heights, MA: Simon and Schuster.
46. A great deal of empirical research has shown that certain
process attributes tend to enhance decision-making outcomes (i.e., a higher
quality process leads to higher quality choices). For instance, see I. Janis.
(1989). Crucial Decisions. New York: Free Press; J. Dean and M. Sharfman.
(1996). “Does decision process matter?,” Academy of Management Journal. 39:
368–396. For a review of studies in this area, see N. Rajagopalan, A. Rasheed,
and D. Datta. (1993). “Strategic decision processes: Critical review and future
directions,” Journal of Management. 19: p. 349–364.
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