Strategy in Health Care: Re-Directing the Field From a Behavioral Strategy Perspective

Abstract

Interest in strategy research in general and in the context of health care more specifically is accelerating rapidly. As health care organizations are increasingly involved in strategic re- orientation and change, scholars have an important opportunity to engage in strategy research. To support these endeavors, one of the two primary goals of this paper is to develop a behavioral strategy framework aiming at synthesizing and integrating the vast and heterogeneous strategy literature. Behavioral strategy seeks to integrate assumptions about human cognition, emotion, and social interaction into strategic management, thereby understanding the foundations of decision making as based on individual cognition and behavior. Building upon this framework, we systematically review 55 studies on strategy in the health care context, published in 34 journals from 1993-2013. Our second goal is to identify key opportunity areas for future strategy research from a behavioral strategy lense. Accordingly, we propose explori...