Creativity and propitiousness in strategic decision making

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between positive perceptions of politics (i.e. positive politics) and decision creativity and propitiousness (i.e. reaching unforeseen advantages while limiting unexpected problems). In addition, drawing from threat-rigidity effect theory the authors argue that such relationships will be resilient to external environmental threats and specifically macro-economic uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach The database for the analyses consisted of 200 strategic decisions gathered from firms located in Dubai. Findings Positive politics significantly influence decision creativity and propitiousness. Also, macro-economic uncertainty moderates this relationship. Research limitations/implications Although this research has tried to adopt a more neutral perspective on political behavior, much more work is required to better understand the role and implications of neutral politics in decision-making. Practical implications If decision makers ensure that the concern for the organization’s welfare remains a priority over the self-serving motives of the actors, then politics can enhance decision success. Social implications This paper challenges the long held conventional wisdom that politics in organizations are an important underlying cause of unethical practices, poor decisions and organizational ineffectiveness. Originality/value The findings serve to further the understanding of complexities involved in the relationships between political behavior and its consequences.

Developing Sustainable Decision Performance for Science and Technology Industries in China

“…Our findings revealed that TMT procedural rationality and constructive political behavior have a significant impact on the performance of strategic decision-making. This indicates that both TMT procedural rationality and constructive political behavior are valuable resources for successful quality and satisfaction of strategic decisions [18,29,30,44]. Thus, this finding accords with previous scholarship that documents that TMTs' procedural rationality and constructive political behavior jointly enhance decision ability in exploring the complex environments to land on a successful quality and satisfaction of strategic decisions [1,3,26].…”

“…Recent empirical studies have shown that procedural rationality and constructive political behavior is associated with higher quality strategic decisions [18,30,44]. We found that TMT behavioral integration is positively associated with TMT decision making performance.…”

“…Constructive political behaviors help defuse destructive political behaviors. If managers abuse information and choose to defend their interests, decision-makers of constructive political behaviors will publicize this information to weaken the negative impact of destructive political behaviors [30]. SDMP as a constructive political process helps decision-makers to use cognitive and social skills for the importance of information decoding and of different strategy advice for feedback, and to enlarge the community understanding of the background to the decision-making, in order to improve the decision-making quality and satisfaction.…”

“…Franke and Foerstl [31] further argues that behavior integration ability of the policymakers' comprehensively enhances team collection and exchange of information to be more efficient in their services to benefit the entire organization. For example, in the process of strategic decision-making, conflicts are inevitable; however, behavior integration among team members could reasonably resolve disputes and strive to seek common ground while redressing differences in achieving a high degree of coordination and unity of decision-making behaviors [18,30].…”

Intellectual Structure and Scientific Evolution of Strategic Decision in the Field of Business and Management from 1971 to 2018

“…To deepen the diverse perspectives, there has been recourse to combining diverse fields such as the rational, intuitive and political decision process as an option to generate the integrative approach for the various domains of SD. Following previous seminal literature (Dean & Sharfman, 1996;Elbanna, 2006Elbanna, , 2018Elbanna, Kapoutsis, & Mellahi, 2017), this study also applies the integrative perspective for addressing the coexistence of the synoptic and incremental perspective on the SD making process. To determine the scope and validity of the bibliometric analysis conducted, this study also applies the inclusion and exclusion criteria.…”