Enterprise Strategic Thinking: A Literature Review and Prospects

Abstract

Due to the growing interest of scholars, enterprise strategic thinking attracts more attention and is considered as an important tool in management research. The aim of this article is to explore the status and prospects of strategic thinking in the enterprise management literature. This article is based on a systematic literature review. The existing literature shows that the research regarding strategic thinking is at the initial stage and the content is relatively scattered. The paper argues that: Firstly, strategic thinking differs from strategic planning in terms of attributes, occurrence levels, operational orientation, and occurrence carriers. Strategic thinking determines strategic orientation which results from strategic thinking. It is the unity of rational thinking and intuitive thinking. Secondly, the game theory, competency modeling and the upper echelons theory are the theoretical basis of strategic thinking. Thirdly, the study of the attribute of strategic thinking transforms from a single rational or generative perspective for balancing the rationality on the practice of strategic thinking and comes from a theoretical discussion to empirical research. Four measurement methods of enterprise strategic thinking are introduced, which are attribute measurement, cognitive logic measurement, experimental measurement, and written text measurement. This paper also explores a few antecedent variables of enterprise strategic thinking such as demographic and individual characteristics, organizational culture, organizational structure, organizational intelligence and leadership style. This paper provides an approach which integrates the scattered knowledge into a systematic knowledge framework of enterprise strategic thinking. It is conducted along two main lines of intersection: First, concept definition is the most basic part, which affects the content of strategic thinking attributes for developing a strategic thinking scale. Second, the cognitive theory in the theoretical foundation provides a basis for the confirmation of the attributes of strategic thinking which helps to build a strategic thinking scale. Through a critical review of the relevant literature on strategic thinking, we find that although some progress is achieved in this field, there still exist many prospects of future directions in enterprise strategic thinking.