Constructing Participation to Strategic Threat

Abstract

Top Management Team involvement in strategizing is assumed and undertheorized, despite the problematic contexts that they present for organizational strategizing. We address this by investigating how a top management team construct participation as they develop their strategizing responses to mediate threats in their external environment. Through an ethnographic field study, we show that the TMT organized participation situationally, according to the alternate configuration of three interconnected practices, boundary defining; commitment assigning and conversation constructing. Our analysis revealed three patterns of participation, retro-active participating proactive participating and contested participating, which were associated with the emergence of different strategizing responses. We found that these practices emerged from the group’s negotiations related to the interplay between expectations present in the TMT’s external organizational environment, their shared group concerns and their individual accountabilities and expertise. We contribute by showing the situated dynamics of TMT participation, through the alternate selection, integration and performance of practices, in relation to their localised group organizing context and the wider social structures, in which they are embedded.