Strategy development: Driving improvisation in Malaysia

Abstract

Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Driving Improvisation in Malaysia AbstractImprovisation is vital for strategy development, but there remains a lack of understanding about this phenomenon. This emerges directly from the insufficient investigation of its drivers and context. This paper extends improvisation research to the unexplored competitive settings of an emerging middle-income economy. Drawing on survey data from Malaysian research-intensive firms, we examine managerial and organizational antecedents of improvisation under turbulence.Findings reveal that organizational risk-taking and manager expertise are common antecedents of improvisation, but additional relationships arise under high (flexibility) and low turbulence (learning, manager tenure), developing capacity to inform practice, which is critically lacking in international business and management theory.Keywords: emerging economy, improvisation, Malaysia, middle-income, strategy, turbulence, IntroductionOrganizational improvisation has emerged as a very important phenomenon in the business arena, enabling manager spontaneity to enable change as circumstances evolve Improvisation theory proposes that firm characteristics can drive action and execution, but this assumes that firms with high or low improvisation share simply high or low levels of the same internal characteristics. Furthermore, research into improvisation typically has not examined antecedent factors but rather has concentrated on outcomes of improvisation (e.g., Nemkova et al., 2012). Despite the environmental context from which improvisation emerges being a key theoretical contingency (Chelariu, Johnston, & Young, 2002;Vendelø, 2009), extant improvisation research has also been biased towards study in high-velocity markets of developed economies (see Aram & Walochik, 1996;Cunha, 2005). As a result, the drivers of improvisation in the different competitive settings of emerging economies remain unexplored. With higher levels of uncertainties than their peers in developed economies and greater frequency of 2 surprising events, arising from rapid and chaotic environmental changes (Zheng & Mai, 2013) the apparent need for firms to adapt to their environment gives rise to our research question:what drives organizational improvisation in an emerging economy under conditions of turbulence?Focusing on this research question, we argue that managerial and organizational characteristics directly affect organizational improvisation, and also competitive turbulence impact...

Planning to improvise? The role of reasoning in the strategy process: Evidence from Malaysia

“…This has traditionally been compounded by the prevalence of conflict avoidance among lower-levels of organisational members (Chi et al, 2009) reducing emergent decision-making from the bottom-up. Despite the seeming dominance of rational-planning in Asian business practices, it has recently been established that emergent improvisation is also being pursued by firms in Asia (Hodgkinson et al, 2016). This is evidenced in China, where rapid and unannounced changes in policies and regulations typically eclipse the original intent of a firm's long-term plans (Ahlstrom & Bruton, 2002).…”

“…However, it remains unclear as to how firms that have traditionally held a predilection toward planning (Tsai et al, 2006) can generate viable strategies that comprise emergent and deliberate qualities, as is deemed necessary in the strategic management literature (e.g., Mintzberg & Waters, 1985). Therefore, understanding how deliberate planning can be reconciled with emergent improvisation is fundamental to establishing viable strategy making in emerging economies (Hodgkinson et al, 2016).…”

“…This is illustrated by de Wit and Meyer (2010) who, for instance, contend that rationally inclined managers favour the strategic planning perspective. However, rational reasoning could indeed factor in driving improvisation and, likewise, intuition could factor into increased planning; but this interplay remains poorly understood (Hodgkinson, Hughes, & Arshad, 2016) with insufficient knowledge of the internal and external conditions that might moderate the relationships between managers' reasoning and strategy development (e.g., Akinci & Sadler-Smith, 2012). …”

“…Yet, given the academic ambivalence towards planning in recent times (Wolf & Floyd, 2013) and the study of improvisation being very much in its infancy (Magni, Proserpio, Hoegl, & Provera, 2009) there remains a need for both a richer and more coherent understanding of both strategic planning and organisational improvisation; particularly in emerging economies. While firms and their strategies in emerging economies differ from their counterparts in developed economies (Ahlstrom, Levitas, Hitt, Dacin, & Zhu, 2014) there remains limited research concerning their strategy development practices (Hodgkinson et al, 2016;Wright, Filatotchev, Hoskisson, & Peng, 2005); a knowledge void that we seek to address.…”

“…First, we examine how rational and intuitive reasoning contribute to the development of strategic planning and improvisation to address the uncertainties facing contemporary managers (Wolf & Floyd, 2013). Second, we respond to calls for research to understand how improvisation can be generated (Nemkova et al, 2012) alongside planning, which is necessary to explore viable strategy making in emerging economies (Hodgkinson et al, 2016). Third, we contribute to the Mintzbergian perspective of strategy process by considering how strategy materialises through managers' cognitive context (c.f.…”