This study examines how Chinese firms began responding to worsening environmental concerns in the late 1990s. Combining predictions from control theory, escalation of commitment, and goal theory, we seek to explain how leaders' cognitions shape the formation of novel responses to the value-laden issue of corporate greening. We propose an iterative model that links leaders' principles with corporate actions and test it using survey data gathered from 360 firms. The model views strategy organically, as a set of adaptive goals and behaviors, and highlights the role of systemic and local feedback loops in strategy formation. We find that top executives who champion new strategic initiatives monitor early success or failure, and adjust their efforts to match early performance feedback. Perceptions of satisfactory performance strengthen leaders' efforts towards their initial target, while perceptions of unsatisfactory performance diminish them. This feedback relationship is invariant throughout favorable or unfavorable expectancies of success, contrary to the contingent prediction of control theory. The model also examines how top-down and bottom-up strategic initiatives combine to help firms maintain a positive momentum of change when champions' efforts decline in the face of premature failure signals.

This article explores some key environmental and organizational characteristics that may influence the type of crisis management system that an emergent crisis type activates. It provides a typology of crises and the decision system attributes that may reduce their negative consequences or amplify their positive consequences. It explores the “fit” of alternative crisis management decision processes with some specific crisis types. It also explores some of the immediate consequences of crisis decision making. The fifth section deals with the longer term consequences of the crisis as a function of the decision processes and the types of crisis the system has faced.

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This article presents Teri’s story of her male-to-female transition in a university setting, revealing issues and strategies for improving the odds of success in transsexual transitions in educational settings.