Paper Included in Best Paper Proceedings

posted on Apr 09 2009

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce that another research project I'm involved in will be included in the Best Paper Proceedings of the Academy of Management Meeting, this time for the 2009 Meeting in Chicago, IL:

The corporate context and the speed of SBU-level decision making

Maximilian Kownatzki*, Jorge Walter**, & Christoph Lechner***

* Oliver Wyman, ** Portland State University, *** University of St. Gallen

In this paper, we examine the impact of the context the corporate headquarter sets for its strategic business units (SBUs) on the speed of strategic decision making at the SBU level. Using two related empirical studies, we first inductively develop a taxonomy of corporate context categories and, second, deductively examine their effects on decision processes at the SBU level. Our results suggest that from a set of nine corporate context categories, four enhance decision speed (financial incentives, target definition, process-related involvement, and HR-/career incentives), one has a negative influence (content-related involvement) and four have no direct effect (arenas for discourse, coercive enforcement, sanctioning, and conflict resolution). Combining these insights with our inductive analysis, we are further able to provide explanations for why certain categories influence decision-making speed. Our study provides novel insights into strategic interactions between headquarters and SBUs as well as into the effects of the corporate context on SBU-level decision-making speed, a crucial determinant of firm performance.

Keywords: Strategic decision making; decision-making speed; corporate context; corporate-SBU interactions; grounded theory; repertory grid