EVOLVING PATTERNS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BELIEFS IN THE FORMATION OF STRATEGY

By examining marketing's strategic role through the lenses of managers operating throughout the organizational structure, researchers and strategists can gain special insights. Adopting a structural-cognitive perspective, the authors employed a longitudinal design, coupled with snowball sampling, to explore the beliefs and changes in beliefs of key actors in a major strategic decision. The results show a dramatic conflict across functions in the interpretation of a proposed new strategy and its consequences. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of the results for the study of managerial thought worlds, organizational learning, and strategy development.