Strategic consensus mapping: A new method for testing and visualizing strategic consensus within and between teams

Abstract

Research on strategic consensus focuses primarily on the extent of agreement among team members regarding organizational strategy. It does not include elements such as the content of the agreement, between-group consensus, or the significance of differences in consensus (e.g., for evaluating the effectiveness of strategic interventions). We propose a new analytical approach, Strategic Consensus Mapping, that provides a comprehensive analysis of strategic consensus within and between groups and that includes intuitive and easy-to-understand visualizations. This approach offers researchers the necessary tools for integrative theory building in strategic consensus, as well as in the broader managerial and organizational cognition domain. Using a case example, we illustrate the proposed methods for a multidimensional, multilevel, and longitudinal analysis of strategic consensus.

Rethinking ‘Top‐Down’ and ‘Bottom‐Up’ Roles of Top and Middle Managers in Organizational Change: Implications for Employee Support

“…A fruitful avenue would be to examine and consolidate the micro-processes through which TMs and MMs can actually make different role configurations work. Indeed, research in this area is gaining significant momentum, albeit in diverse niches, such as quality of change communications (Boselie and Koene, 2010;Vuori and Huy, 2016), shared professional identities to stimulate extra-role behaviours (Heyden et al, 2015a), regulatory foci of middle managers and their search behaviors (Ahmadi et al, 2017), a shared interpretative context to cope with the paradoxical change demands (Knight and Paroutis, 2016), strategic consensus involving different management levels (Tarakci et al, 2014), and integrative bargaining between TMs and MMs (Raes et al, 2011). Our study on TM-MM role configurations adds an important conceptual frame that allows us to organize, develop, and critically evaluate this nascent literature and question extant assumptions regarding the roles that TMs and MMs play in organizational change.…”

Do Group and Organizational Identification Help or Hurt Intergroup Strategic Consensus?

“…This builds on the definition of within-group strategic consensus (Kellermanns et al, 2005(Kellermanns et al, , 2011, broadening it to an intergroup level. So far, research on strategic consensus has investigated consensus within teams and has examined mostly the top management of the organization because it is seen as the primary constituent of the strategy process (Kellermanns et al, 2005;Tarakci et al, 2014). Our definition of consensus involves interdependent teams at all levels of the organization, however, to reflect the recent shift in strategy process research to focus on all levels of the organizational hierarchy (González-Benito, Aguinis, Boyd, & Suárez-González, 2012;Kellermanns et al, 2005).…”

“…In addition, separating the TMT enabled a supplementary analysis of dyads' strategic alignment with the TMT. We further discarded 17 work groups: five groups that had less than 50% response rate, because the remaining responses may not represent the group as a whole (Van Ophem, Stam, & van Praag, 1999), and 11 groups that had only one or two respondents, which prior research does not recommend for measuring strategic consensus (Tarakci et al, 2014). The discarded teams did not differ from the teams in the sample with respect to any of the study's independent variables (largest t value was 1.35, p = .182).…”

Concept mapping—An effective method for identifying diversity and congruity in cognitive style

“…Although these limitations were present here, there were some indications that cognitive style plays an important role in the GCM process. These observations should encourage further exploration of the subject, perhaps utilizing new types of analysis, such as functional network analysis (Goldman & Kane, 2014), social network analysis (McLinden, 2013) and strategic consensus maps (Tarakci, Ates, Porck, van Knippenberg Groenen, & de Haas, 2013). …”