The Competent Organization: A Psychological Analysis of the Strategic Management Process (Managing Work and Organizations) [Hardcover]

Within the field of strategic management, there is an increasing awareness of the limitations of rational approaches to decision making. Managing in a climate of continuous change and uncertainty has turned attention to the role of managerial cognition. The "Competent Organization" explores the nature of cognition in organizations and focuses upon: the behaviour and characteristics of top management teams; organizational learning and memory; distributed cognition and information markets; the significance of knowledge management and tacit learning; key competencies such as emotional intelligence, information searching, decision making heuristics, creativity, intuition; and how organizations might be helped to become more cognitively effective. "This trail-blazing book presents a clearly written, extensive survey of research about many psychological aspects of strategic analyses. It provocatively argues for the existence and practical impact of a 'strategic competence' that integrates rationality, intuition, emotion, and rules of thumb. In a world where technological developments are demanding ever faster strategic reactions, and where globalization is making markets and organizations more and more complex, to understand the psychology of strategizing has become imperative. This book will attract and stimulate organizational psychologists, strategic-management scholars, and management consultants as well as corporate learning officers." - Professor Bill Starbuck, Past (USA) Academy of Management President, and Professor at Stern Business School, New York. "The first comprehensive treatment of a newly emerging field of study that uses established psychological and social principles to understand and begin to improve the processes of strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and organizational learning. Reading it was invigorating!" - Professor Susan E. Jackson, School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University. "A path-breaking work: comprehensive, visionary - and accessible." - Professor Mark Easterby-Smith, Lancaster University Management School. "A refreshingly critical perspective on the origins of strategic competence. Hodgkinson and Sparrow's knowledge management lens breathes coherence into a fragmented body of work...a broad rich overview of the field of managerial and organizational cognition." - Kathleen Sutcliffe, Associate Professor, University of Michigan Business School. "A significant step toward a trans-disciplinary understanding of strategic management in this accessible, well-written book which provides an attractive new vocabulary for understanding how organization competencies are grounded in cognitive processes." - from the foreword by Anne S. Huff, University of Colorado at Denver, and Cranfield School of Management.

Gerard Hodgkinson is Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Strategic Management at Leeds University Business School. Paul Sparrow is Professor of International Human Resource Management at Manchester Business School.