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Causal Cognitive Mapping in the Organizational Strategy Field: A Comparison of Alternative Elicitation Procedures

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Abstract

The present study evaluates two alternative causal cognitive mapping procedures that exemplify key differences among a number of direct elicitation techniques currently in use in the organizational strategy field: pairwise evaluation of causal relationships and a freeh and approach. The pairwise technique yielded relatively elaborate maps, but participants found the task more difficult, less engaging, and less representative than the freeh and approach. Implications for the choice of procedures in interventionist and research contexts are considered.

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... One of the chief criticisms of RGT is that respondents find it boring and onerous to complete (Brown, 1992;Calori et al., 1994;Hodgkinson et al., 2004). The technique can be made less tedious by providing respondents with feedback in real-time on how their cognitive map is developing (e.g., using a paper and pencil grid elicitation process) (Village et al., 2013). ...
... Other techniques for measuring thinking, such as freehand mind mapping, analyzing raw text to produce maps (e.g., Fransella & Bannister, 1977), or prompting respondents to "think out loud" as they connect elements and constructs (e.g., Malmström et al., 2015) may require less effort than RGT. However, these techniques may demand more of a respondent in terms of spatial reasoning and working memory than RGT, and although accurate, could provide less detail about the thought process (Hodgkinson et al., 2004;Brown, 1992). Another ready alternative to the RGT is the use of a standard questionnaire or loosely structured interview. ...
... interpretation of context surrounding strategic management decisions (Dagnino & Cinici, 2016), consideration of decision attributes for opportunity recognition and overall decision-making (Malmström et al., 2015), the underlying logic of decision-making (Fransella & Bannister, 1977), the study of strategic phenomena (Hodgkinson et al., 2004), and perceived influences/context affecting strategic decisions (Brown, 1992). RGT has also been used to study paradox in organizations (Wright, 2015). ...
Thesis
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This study explores the thinking behind decision-making when paradoxical tensions are present. This decision-making norm consists of ignoring rather than engaging with underlying paradoxical tensions. This study supports the idea that engaging with paradoxical tensions at a cognitive level is influenced by the kind of tensions involved in the decision situation. This study also points to two cognitive dimensions that decision-makers use to distinguish between types of decisions: information use and contextual focus. Finally, this study offers the possibility that a class of decisions with paradoxical tensions requiring information for cognitive exploration and a focus on external context has yet to be identified.
... The methods to elicit cognitive maps can be divided into two groups depending on how data is obtained [43]. Initially, researchers used documents or other sources of evidence to perform content analysis to develop these maps. ...
... In the second form, with the subject's help, a facilitator builds a visual representation using paper and pencil or software solutions. The pairwise approach has better coverage at the expense of being more difficult, less engaging, and less representative than the freehand technique [43]. Since the startup context is defined by time and resource constraints [23], an effective approach targeted to these companies should not be time-consuming. ...
... Based on the example of case F, it is clear that such an aspect was not reached. This fact is probably related to our choice of using a freehand approach rather than pairwise judgments of causal relationships that are linked to a better coverage [43] as we discussed in Section 2.4. Besides that, our goal was to reach an initial set of hypotheses that could be extended and iteratively refined throughout the startup existence. ...
Article
Context: Software startups develop innovative, software-intensive products. Given the uncertainty associated with such an innovative context, experimentation, an approach based on validating assumptions about the software product through data obtained from diverse techniques, like A/B tests or interviews, is valuable for these companies. Relying on data rather than opinions reduces the chance of developing unnecessary products or features, improving the likelihood of success, especially in early development stages, when implementing unnecessary features represents a higher risk for companies’ survival. Nevertheless, researchers have argued that the lack of clearly defined practices led to limited adoption of experimentation. Since the first step of the approach is to define hypotheses, testable statements about the software product features, based on which software development teams will create experiments, eliciting hypotheses is a natural first step to develop practices. Objective: We aim to develop a systematic technique for identifying hypotheses in early-stage software startups to support experimentation in these companies and, consequently, improve their software products. Methods: We followed a Design Science approach consisting of an artifact construction process, divided in three phases, and an evaluation within three startups. Results: We developed the HyMap, a hypotheses elicitation technique based on cognitive mapping. It consists of a process conducted by a facilitator using pre-defined questions, supported by a visual language to depict a cognitive map representing the founder’s understanding of the product. Our evaluation showed that founders perceived the artifacts as clear, easy to use, and useful leading to hypotheses and facilitating their idea’s visualization. Conclusion: From a theoretical perspective, our study provides a better understanding of the guidance founders use to develop their startups and, from a practical point of view, a technique to identify hypotheses in early-stage software startups.
... Several approaches to facilitated modelling assimilate broad perspectives and access to information (see [1,18]). One of the most popular is to represent ideas in causal maps ( [29], closely related to mental models [30] and cognitive maps [31]), usually involving free-hand drawings of relationships between drivers (e.g., [32]). As the name suggests, causal maps are graphical mental models that show the direction of causation between variables. ...
... This approach is comprehensive but time-consuming. Participants find it burdensome and the number of pairwise comparisons increases rapidly with the number of variables considered [29]. Causal maps constructed in this way tend to be much larger and include many more links than those based on free-hand, informal constructions [29; see also 17]. ...
... The translation step involves a raft of decisions about which variables to include, the kind of model, its equations and assumptions, among others [17]. The validity of the move from qualitative to quantitative analysis depends on the narrative or visual representation of cause and effect and the mathematical expressions being closely aligned [29,49]. Kemp-Benedict [50] suggested that analysts should faithfully represent the narrative in their mathematical models, as well as any fundamental constraints (e.g., energy or mass balances, economic limits), dependencies, and the spatial and temporal scales of key processes. ...
Article
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Notionally objective probabilistic risk models, built around ideas of cause and effect, are used to predict impacts and evaluate trade-offs. In this paper, we focus on the use of expert judgement to fill gaps left by insufficient data and understanding. Psychological and contextual phenomena such as anchoring, availability bias, confirmation bias and overconfidence are pervasive and have powerful effects on individual judgements. Research across a range of fields has found that groups have access to more diverse information and ways of thinking about problems, and routinely outperform credentialled individuals on judgement and prediction tasks. In structured group elicitation, individuals make initial independent judgements, opinions are respected, participants consider the judgements made by others, and they may have the opportunity to reconsider and revise their initial estimates. Estimates may be aggregated using behavioural, mathematical or combined approaches. In contrast, mathematical modelers have been slower to accept that the host of psychological frailties and contextual biases that afflict judgements about parameters and events may also influence model assumptions and structures. Few, if any, quantitative risk analyses embrace sources of uncertainty comprehensively. However, several recent innovations aim to anticipate behavioural and social biases in model construction and to mitigate their effects. In this paper, we outline approaches to eliciting and combining alternative ideas of cause and effect. We discuss the translation of ideas into equations and assumptions, assessing the potential for psychological and social factors to affect the construction of models. We outline the strengths and weaknesses of recent advances in structured, group-based model construction that may accommodate a variety of understandings about cause and effect.
... The methods to elicit cognitive maps can be divided into two groups depending on how data is obtained [35]. Initially, researchers used documents or other sources of evidence to perform content analysis to develop these maps. ...
... In the second form, with the subject's help, a facilitator builds a visual representation using paper and pencil or software solutions. The pairwise approach has better coverage at the expense of being more difficult, less engaging, and less representative than the freehand technique [35]. Since the startup context is defined by time and resource constraints [24], an effective approach targeted to these companies should not be time-consuming. ...
... Based on the example of case F, it is clear that such an aspect was not reached. This fact is probably related to our choice of using a freehand approach rather than a pairwise that is linked to a better coverage [35] as we discussed earlier. Besides that, our goal was to reach an initial set of hypotheses that could be extended and refined throughout the startup existence. ...
Preprint
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Context: Software startups develop innovative, software-intensive products. Given the uncertainty associated with such an innovative context, experimentation is a valuable approach for these companies, especially in the early stages of the development, when implementing unnecessary features represents a higher risk for companies' survival. Nevertheless, researchers have argued that the lack of clearly defined practices led to limited adoption of experimentation. In this regard, the first step is to define the hypotheses based on which teams will create experiments. Objective: We aim to develop a systematic technique to identify hypotheses for early-stage software startups. Methods: We followed a Design Science approach consisted of three cycles in the construction phase, that involved seven startups in total, and an evaluation of the final artifact within three startups. Results: We developed the HyMap, a hypotheses elicitation technique based on cognitive mapping. It consists of a visual language to depict a cognitive map representing the founder's understanding of the product, and a process to elicit this map consisted of a series of questions the founder must answer. Our evaluation showed that the artifacts are clear, easy to use, and useful leading to hypotheses and facilitating founders to visualize their idea. Conclusion: Our study contributes to both descriptive and prescriptive bodies of knowledge. Regarding the first, it provides a better understanding of the guidance founders use to develop their startups and, for the latter, a technique to identify hypotheses in early-stage software startups.
... Defined as a modeling technique for graphing the causal relationships among a person's ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and values that lead to a particular decision or action (Eden, 2004), causal cognitive mapping is likely to benefit entrepreneurial cognition research (Brännback & Carsrud, 2017b). As a family of procedures designed to capture, through interviews (Hodgkinson et al., 2004), the complexity of individuals' cognitions (Axelrod, 2015;Ho & Wilson, 2008;Hodgkinson et al., 2004), the approach provides new answers that would otherwise be difficult to obtain by using only linear and disjunctive perspectives. Two methodological tools are commonly used for causal cognitive mapping (Swan, 1997). ...
... Defined as a modeling technique for graphing the causal relationships among a person's ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and values that lead to a particular decision or action (Eden, 2004), causal cognitive mapping is likely to benefit entrepreneurial cognition research (Brännback & Carsrud, 2017b). As a family of procedures designed to capture, through interviews (Hodgkinson et al., 2004), the complexity of individuals' cognitions (Axelrod, 2015;Ho & Wilson, 2008;Hodgkinson et al., 2004), the approach provides new answers that would otherwise be difficult to obtain by using only linear and disjunctive perspectives. Two methodological tools are commonly used for causal cognitive mapping (Swan, 1997). ...
... The methods at the other end of the continuum were developed within the field of strategy (for example, "argument-cognitive maps" and "cognitive-framework maps"), and they involve considerable interpretation by the researcher (Huff, 1990, p. 15). The causal mapping method, which is among the most popular cognitive mapping methods used in the organizational research (Hodgkinson et al., 2004), is situated at the midpoint of this continuum. Weick and Bougon (1986, p. 106) differentiate between cognitive maps and causal cognitive maps. ...
Article
Despite the growing prevalence of causal mapping procedures in the organizational strategy field and the growing body of research on entrepreneurial cognition, there have been surprisingly few investigations on how scholars might use causal cognitive mapping to elicit entrepreneurs’ cognition. Based on the complementarity between the visual graph method and the matrix-multiplication method, this article outlines an integrative method that both overcomes the methodological issues of causal cognitive mapping and expands the qualitative methods used in the field of entrepreneurial cognition. By performing an empirical comparison, this article provides step-by-step guidance to empower scholars who either choose between these two methods or seek to use these methods in a complementary manner. Particular emphasis is placed on the methodological contributions that expand the entrepreneurial cognition toolbox. The methodological limits and potential improvements of these two methods regarding causal mapping are discussed.
... This paper introduces the method of cognitive mapping (Axelrod 1976) to the study of public opinion, and cognitive complexity in particular. This technique has been applied in organizational studies, political science, and social psychology to understand decision-making processes of managers and bankers (Hodgkinson, Maule, and Bown 2004;van Esch and de Jong 2019). ...
... In cognitive maps, concepts are visually depicted as points in a diagram with arrows indicating a causal direction or mutual relationship between them (Axelrod 1976;Hodgkinson, Maule, and Bown 2004). All points (concepts) and arrows (relationships) together depict an actor's belief system. ...
... This allows a bottom-up reflection of the issue under study. Respondents can create their personal cognitive map in two ways (Hodgkinson, Maule, and Bown 2004): (a) pairwise judgments of causal relationships between potential concepts, or (b) a freehand approach in which actors visually express their belief system. ...
Article
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Cognitive complexity is a concept that allows scholars to distinguish unidimensional thinking from multidimensional thinking, which allows citizens to identify and integrate various perspectives of a topic. Especially in times of fake news, fact-free politics, and affective polarization, the news media would ideally foster such complex political understanding. The current paper introduces the method of cognitive mapping to measure cognitive complexity regarding citizens’ understanding of the financial crisis, one of the most pressing political issues of the past decades. Linking content-analytic data to panel-survey data, we examine how exposure to news about the crisis relates to cognitive complexity. A wide variety of news sources (print, television, and online) were analyzed to take the high-choice media environment into account. Results show that news consumption generally is related to a less cognitively complex understanding of the financial crisis. However, actual exposure to news about the crisis (combined measurement of content analysis and survey data) is positively related to cognitive complexity, particularly among less-educated citizens. In addition, the most prominent topics in news coverage were more frequently associated with the financial crisis, as reflected in the cognitive maps of less-educated citizens exposed to more crisis news. These findings demonstrate the potential of news media to increase citizens’ complexity of understanding, especially among the less educated.
... Our review of numerous recent CMing studies, which seek to capture farmers' beliefs on various aspects of their living environment, delivered an inventory of methods used to obtain CMs. This is reminiscent of the fact that across disciplines, despite the widespread popularity of these techniques, no consensus has formed within literature as to the most appropriate way to elicit CMs in general (Hodgkinson, Maule, & Bown, 2004;Van Winsen et al., 2013). One commonly distinguishes between (i) indirect elicitation procedures, where the researcher is required to recreate or infer the network of concepts and edges from an oral interview or from questionnaire data (e. ...
... The latter category includes approaches whereby participants represent their causal belief systems using a hand-drawn paper-and-pencil procedure. Hodgkinson et al. (2004) compared the two methods and found that the latter freehand method was more likely to elicit too few relations and concepts (omission), while the pairwise comparison techniques was more likely to elicit too many or irrelevant relations (commission). We could conclude that such method issues of 'memory error' are inherently part of the elicitation process. ...
Thesis
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The Flemish beef sector faces growing economic uncertainty and societal criticisms. Agroecology is regularly proposed as an alternative development pathway, yet what this exactly means in this context is largely unexplored. This doctoral research aimed at investigating the relevance of agroecology to beef farming in Flanders. By gathering and analyzing data from a diverse group of Flemish beef farmers with both qualitative and quantitative methods, this dissertation renders agroecology as a practice more concrete conceptually in this context. The analysis of these farmers accounts also served to lay bare important ambiguities and inadequacies within agroecological thought with regard to the transformative potential of these agroecological practices, farmers, and the systems they construct. Out of this dialogue between agroecology and farmers thus emerged a more general societal reflection that advances contemporary ideas and practices to transform food systems CITE THIS VERSION Tessier, Louis. The pursuit of agroecological principles by Flemish beef farmers : advancing towards a body of thought for sustainable food systems. Prom. : Baret, Philippe ; Marchand, Fleur http:// hdl.handle.net/2078.
... Our review of numerous recent CMing studies, which seek to capture farmers' beliefs on various aspects of their living environment, delivered an inventory of methods used to obtain CMs. This is reminiscent of the fact that across disciplines, despite the widespread popularity of these techniques, no consensus has formed within literature as to the most appropriate way to elicit CMs in general (Hodgkinson et al. 2004;Van Winsen et al. 2013). One commonly distinguishes between (i) indirect elicitation procedures, where the researcher is required to re-create or infer the network of concepts and edges from an oral interview or from questionnaire data (e. ...
... The latter category includes approaches whereby participants represent their causal belief systems using a hand-drawn paper-and-pencil procedure. Hodgkinson et al. (2004) compared the two methods and found that the latter free-hand method was more likely to elicit too few relations and concepts (omission), while the pairwise comparison techniques was more likely to elicit too many or irrelevant relations (commission). We could conclude that such method issues of 'memory error' are inherently part of the elicitation process. ...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we reflect on the effectiveness of cognitive mapping (CMing) as a method to study farm functioning in its complexity and its diverse forms in the framework of our own experiment with a diverse group of Flemish beef farmers. With a structured direct elicitation method we gathered 30 CMs. We analyzed the content of these maps both qualitatively and quantitatively. The central role of the concept “Income” in most maps indicated a shared concern for economic security. Further, the CMs indicated that farmers dealt with this shared social reality differently, as the relationships included in their maps referred to different functional processes relating to revenue streams, marketing strategies, investment decisions, dependence on production inputs, on-farm resource management, and personal well-being. With a clustering algorithm we grouped farmers based on the relationships in their maps, which allowed us to trace some of the broader patterns within the data, such as the existence of more business- and investment-minded farmers, in contrast to farmers focused on their quality of life, and animal production-oriented in contrast to marketing-oriented farmers. Taking into account farmers’ comments, we find that the applied methods had limited capability to classify farmers based on their perspectives on farming. Still, the system presentations proved useful to study what aspects farmers were working on or towards, and how these aspects may actually fit together as a whole. CMing was therefore mostly effective in exploring farm functioning in its complexity, and less so in exploring farm functioning in its diversity.
... Based on this assessment, the existence or not of the corresponding causal connection is inferred (c.f. [26] ). ...
... The Innovation Manager (AGI-6) presents microprocessor rectifier prototype (R&D-2), medium voltage panel (36kV) with reduced dimensions (R&D-5), and incremental improvements in columns of CCMs and panels of low voltage (R&D-10) projects to funding agencies 20 [13][14][15][16][17][18] The Innovation Manager (AGI-6) realizes the opportunity to frame the platform of instrument transformers for high voltage (72.5 -550kV) project (R&D-9) in a finance program 21 14-19 NGI invites Science and Technology Institute (ICT2) to participate in the development of a computational system for the management of medium and low voltage network assets (R&D-12) due the advances in the development of a software to increase the efficiency of hydroelectric generation (R&D-4) 22 [13][14][15][16][17][18][19] The Innovation Manager (AGI-6) takes notice of a new program for innovation project financing (PROG7) 23 7-20 IEM identifies "solar photovoltaic energy generation" as a priority for the Brazilian government (PROG11) 24 2-20 IEM develops solutions for energy generation 25 16-21 IEM manufactures "Panel 36kV" (R&D-5) prototypes 26 16 The Innovation Manager (AGI19) realizes availability of internal structure to participate in an "innovation management program" (PROG12) 32 26-27 "R&D Department" knows "Visual management" from the "innovation management program" 33 [25][26][27][28] Top Management realizes the need to allocate a specific employee for innovation management 34 1-29 Shareholders create a bond with a French company 35 28-30 "R&D Department" knows "Supervision Committee" from the "innovation management program" 36 26-30 "R&D Department" knows "Supervision Committee" from the "innovation management program" 37 29-31 ...
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This paper presents an innovative application of event structure analysis (ESA). The key improvements incorporated on the method are: (i) a robust system for coding events; (ii) the use of causal process tracing tests for inferring necessary connections; (iii) the combination of ESA with network analyses. Finally, we propose five types of analysis for event network models ( i.e., critical elements, critical associations, critical connections, critical specific happenings, and critical antecedents) and exemplify some of them in a causal case study about the process of capability construction for open innovation management in an Industrial Electronic Manufacturer.
... In this paper we present Wardley Mapping as a technique and a practice used by decision-makers to acquire situational awareness for strategic sensemaking of digital ecosystems. Earlier literature has researched cognitive mapping techniques, most prominently causal mapping, including semantic mapping and concept mapping (Eden, 1992;Fiol and Huff, 1992;Markíczy and Goldberg, 1995;Clarke and Mackaness, 2001;Eden, 2004;Hodgkinson et al., 2004;Siau and Tan, 2008). However, to our knowledge, none has focused on mapping to enhance situational awareness. ...
... However, to our knowledge, none has focused on mapping to enhance situational awareness. Furthermore, literature on cognitive mapping presents mapping as a research technique for mental representation (Clarke and Mackaness, 2001;Ahmad and Ali, 2003;Hodgkinson et al., 2004). Our study of mapping is closer to Eden (2004), Fiol and Huff (1992) or Siau and Tan (2008), who study mapping as a support tool in organisational decision-making "in an uncertain world" (Fiol and Huff, 1992). ...
Conference Paper
We discuss the little-explored construct of situational awareness, which will arguably become increasingly important for strategic decision-making in the age of distributed service ecosystems, digital infrastructures, and microservices. Guided by a design science approach, we introduce a mapping artefact with the ability to enhance situational awareness within, and across, horizontal value chains, and evaluate its application in the field amongst both IS practitioners and IS researchers. We make suggestions for further research into both construct and artefact, and provide insights on their use in practice. https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2019_rp/178/
... Developments in Managerial and Organisational Cognition (MOC) increased interest and use of cognitive mapping techniques in organisation studies (Huff, 1990;Fiol and Huff, 1992;Eden and Spender, 1998;Huff and Jenkins, 2002;Hodgkinson and Maule, 2004;Narayanan and Armstrong, 2005). Hodgkinson and colleagues provide comprehensive reviews of research on causal mapping, a form of the cognitive mapping technique (see Hodgkinson and Healey, 2008;Hodgkinson and Clarkson, 2005;Hodgkinson et al., 2017). ...
... In response to this observation, research on debiasing has delved into methods and tools to mitigate the adverse effects of cognitive biases in corporate contexts (Larrick, 2004). Historically, this research has predominantly focused on active intervention techniques, such as scenario planning (Schoemaker, 1993) and cognitive mapping (Hodgkinson et al., 2004). However, recent research has also underscored the vital role of executives' information-acquisition behaviors, which positively contribute to information interpretation during the decision-making process and aid in mitigating biased judgments (Meissner & Wulf, 2016). ...
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This study investigates CEOs' advice-seeking behavior in small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and its influence on managing the financial difficulties these firms face. Grounded in the attention-based view of firms, our framework posits that CEOs' advice seeking plays a sequential role in shaping a firm's response to financial distress, by influencing CEOs' awareness of financial difficulties and, subsequently, the restructuring process. We differentiate between advice sought from formal and informal advisors and consider top management team (TMT) functional diversity as a moderator. We test these hypotheses using a proprietary dataset of 407 financially distressed SMEs in France. Our results indicate that advice seeking significantly enhances CEOs' decision to proceed to restructuring and this effect is mediated by the heightened financial awareness of CEOs. Furthermore, our research highlights the moderating role of the functional diversity of TMT members in the relationship between advice seeking and the restructuring decision.
... A mental model is a lay theory that describes how and why things happen. It entails concepts or meaning structures (Dane, 2010;Nadkarni & Narayanan, 2007) (e.g., customer data) and cause-effect relationships between concepts (Furnari, 2015;Hodgkinson et al., 1999;Hodgkinson et al., 2004;Huff, 1990) (e.g., the use of partners' customer data to create value-adding services). ...
Article
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Research Summary The question of why and how strategic leaders differ in the ecosystems they envision is central to firms' digital transformation. We unpack the cognitive microfoundations of how strategic leaders form their ecosystem vision —a mental model of a firm's multilateral complementarities with its partners to realize a value proposition. Our motivated interactional lens emphasizes the role of strategic leaders' cognitive motivation for shaping four interaction types with (prospective) partners: participatory, selective, collaborative, and reclusive. We theorize how these interactions shape the changes strategic leaders make in their mental models, and thus, to envision different levels and types of complementarities with (prospective) partners in the digital transformation. Our theory illuminates the roles of strategic leaders, their cognitive motivations, and social interactions in firms' ecosystem leadership. Managerial Summary Digital transformation is an ecosystem challenge for incumbent firms. As part of their ecosystem leadership, strategic leaders need to form a vision of how to complement their value offerings with (prospective) partners' offerings. This vision, in turn, can affect the types of ecosystems they enact. We develop a theoretical model that emphasizes the role of strategic leaders' cognitive motivation for the interactions they engage in with (prospective) partners and for the types of ecosystem visions they form as a result.
... Many of the key ideas were already in place by the end of the 1970s. The subsequent literature covers a variety of specific techniques to elicit maps from documents, individuals, sets of individuals and groups, with or without software support, following protocols from the purely open-ended to those which use strictly pre-defined lists of factors and links (see Hodgkinson et al (2004) for a comparison of methods), and with aims ranging from strictly idiographic (understanding individuals in specific contexts as Axelrod did) to more nomothetic, such as Tegarden et al. (2016). ...
Article
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Evaluators are interested in capturing how things causally influence one another. They are also interested in capturing how stakeholders think things causally influence one another. Causal mapping – the collection, coding and visualisation of interconnected causal claims – has been used widely for several decades across many disciplines for this purpose. It makes the provenance or source of such claims explicit and provides tools for gathering and dealing with this kind of data and for managing its Janus-like double-life: on the one hand, providing information about what people believe causes what, and on the other hand, preparing this information for possible evaluative judgements about what causes what. Specific reference to causal mapping in the evaluation literature is sparse, which we aim to redress here. In particular, the authors address the Janus dilemma by suggesting that causal maps can be understood neither as models of beliefs about causal pathways nor as models of causal pathways per se but as repositories of evidence for those pathways.
... Therefore, the nodes in the cognitive maps represent those strategic issues and the TCSR, while directional edges with strength values represent the causal effect relations between the two nodes. A causal effect could be negative (−) or positive (+), and its weight might be weak (one), moderate (two), or strong (three) (Hodgkinson et al., 2004). Fig. 2 illustrates an example of the cognitive maps in the original data of this study, including positive and negative causal relationships between the elements with associated weights. ...
Article
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This study proposes an application of cognitive maps in the representation of cognitive structures of the experts and assessment of their development/modification as a result of a (computer or expert system-assisted) learning process. It strives to identify information needed for the guidance of the process of creation and management of expert knowledge by formal modeling tools. Changes in experts’ cognitive structures are assumed to stem from individual and collaborative (group-level) learning. The novel approach to assessing the outcomes of learning reflected as changes in the cognitive structures of experts or groups of experts, modeled by cognitive maps, does not assume any correct or desired outcome of the learning process to be known in advance. Instead, it identifies and analyzes the changes in (or robustness of) the constituents of the cognitive maps from different points of view and allows for quantifying and visualizing the actual effect of the learning. The proposed methodology can identify changes in cognitive diversity, causal structures in terms of causal relations and concepts, and the perceived importance of strategic issues over the learning period. It can also detect which cause–effect relationships have appeared/disappeared considering the pre-/post-mapping design. Thus, it provides an exploratory account on the changes in the cognitive structures of the expert(s) as a result of learning. The applicability of the proposed methods is illustrated in the assessment of the learning outcomes of a group of 71 graduate students who participated in an eight-week business simulation task. The results of the empirical analysis confirm the viability of the proposed methodology and indicate that the students’ understanding of the utilized concepts and associated relationships in the decision-making process improved throughout the learning activity, ultimately showing that the course learning has considerably improved students’ perception and knowledge. Based on the results, it can be concluded that the proposed approach has the potential to be effective in assessing learning outcomes in teaching–learning activities.
... In response to this observation, research on debiasing has delved into methods and tools to mitigate the adverse effects of cognitive biases in corporate contexts (Larrick, 2004). Historically, this research has predominantly focused on active intervention techniques, such as scenario planning (Schoemaker, 1993) and cognitive mapping (Hodgkinson et al., 2004). However, recent research has also underscored the vital role of executives' information-acquisition behaviors, which positively contribute to information interpretation during the decision-making process and aid in mitigating biased judgments (Meissner & Wulf, 2016). ...
Conference Paper
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This study examines the effect of the CEO's environment through advice seeking in managing firm's financial difficulties. We use three advice-seeking modalities (source, intensity, and diversity) to theorize about the CEO's consciousness of insolvency risk and the restructuring decision. Our predictions are tested using a sample of 407 French SMEs in financial distress in the Rhône-Alpes region. The results indicate that the CEO's internal (TMT) and external advice-seeking intensity positively affect the CEO's consciousness of insolvency risk and the restructuring decision. The results also show that the functional diversity of TMT members positively moderates the relationship between the CEO's advice-seeking intensity and their consciousness of insolvency risk. In contrast, we found a negative moderating effect of diversity in external advice seeking. By examining the management of financial distress from the perspective of manager's advice seeking, we take the first steps toward a more realistic and general understanding of this phenomenon.
... Since cognitive models are central to organizational phenomena, researchers have explored ways to elicit and understand them (Bougon, 1983;Carley and Palmquist, 1992;Oliver and Montgomery, 2008;Siau and Tan, 2008;Sperry and Jetter, 2019;Swan, 1997;Weick and Bougon, 1986). Causal mapping has emerged as a prominent approach to understanding how people explain a phenomenon by mapping concepts and their causal relationships (Armstrong, 2005;Hodgkinson, Maule and Bown, 2004;Narayanan and Fahey, 1990). Through interviews and focus groups, participants reveal concepts and relationships, and various techniques such as Self-Q and repertory grid are used to capture individuals' subjective sense-making processes (Ananth, Nazareth and Ramamurthy, 2011;Bougon, 1983;Tan and Hunter, 2002). ...
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From employees’ varied interpretations of software efficacy to consumers’ diverse be- liefs about data privacy, technology frames refer to cognitive interpretations, assumptions and expectations that people use to comprehend the essence of information technology within a particular context. These frames differ across groups with different values, in- terests, experiences and expertise, having critical implications for researchers, managers and organizations. Despite theoretical enthusiasm to understand technology frames, lim- ited methodological insights exist on how to systematically explore and compare tech- nology frames. This gap impedes researchers from exploring novel questions related to technology frames, their variations and how they can be managed effectively. This paper proposes a cognitive method for comparing and elaborating on technology frames. Build- ing on causal mapping and empirical studies, the method formulates steps to plan, elicit, compare and elaborate on the relationships that underlie framing differences. The method offers detailed recommendations and templates for effectively organizing and communi- cating diverse manifestations of framing differences and their implications. The paper concludes by highlighting the method’s practical implications and encouraging research to advance extant knowledge of technology frames in the rapidly changing digital world.
... Issues of validity and reliability are always a concern with qualitative methods like cognitive mapping and verbal protocols (Billsberry et al., 2005;Hodgkinson et al., 2004). The cognitive map is a metaphorical representation of mental processes and neural structures. ...
Article
Purpose This paper contributes to leadership categorization theory by advocating a new method to surface people's implicit leadership theories. The purpose of this new approach is to simultaneously capture individual difference in how they conceptualize leadership but within a common framework to allow for comparison of within- and between-person effects. Design/methodology/approach The authors conduct a narrative review of the implicit leadership theory, leadership categorization theory, cognitive mapping and verbal protocol literature with the purpose of surfacing a research method that will overcome the problems of over-simplification and over-individualization in existing methods. Findings The authors argue that using a combination of cognitive mapping and verbal protocols can capture the idiosyncrasies of individual lay theories of leadership while retaining the ability to compare people's responses through a common framework. The authors provide an example of how this method can be used to elicit people's perceptions of one aspect of implicit leadership theories, intelligence. Research limitations/implications This new method will provide a methodology to test the subset propositions advocated by leadership categorization theory. These include the idea that subordinate level implicit leadership theories contain a subset of attributes found in the basic-level implicit leadership theories, that there is attribute integrity in superordinate implicit leadership theories through the levels, and the idea that people define leadership differently depending on the context they are observing. Originality/value Whereas previous approaches to surfacing people's implicit leadership theories either heavily constrain their responses with a predetermined generic suite of attributes or are totally open-ended and idiosyncratic, the authors advocate an approach that combines the best of both.
... Many of the key ideas were already in place by the end of the 1970s. The subsequent literature covers a variety of specific techniques to elicit maps from documents, individuals, sets of individuals and groups, with or without software support, following protocols from the purely open-ended to those which use strictly pre-defined lists of factors and links (see Hodgkinson et al (2004) for a comparison of methods), and with aims ranging from strictly idiographic (understanding individuals in specific contexts as Axelrod did) to more nomothetic, such as Tegarden et al. (2016). Identify variables X with high outdegree and Y with high indegree and construct an 'etiograph' to show all the multiple paths from one point to another; discuss how respondents might have influence over some variables. ...
Preprint
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p> Evaluators are interested in capturing how things causally influence one another. They are also interested in capturing how stakeholders think things causally influence one another. Causal mapping, the collection, coding and visualisation of interconnected causal claims, has been used widely for several decades across many disciplines for this purpose. It makes the provenance or source of such claims explicit and provides tools for gathering and dealing with this kind of data, and for managing its Janus-like double-life: on the one hand providing information about what people believe causes what and on the other hand preparing this information for possible evaluative judgements about what actually causes what. Specific reference to causal mapping in the evaluation literature is sparse, which we aim to redress here. In particular we address the Janus dilemma by suggesting that causal maps can be understood neither as models of beliefs about causal pathways nor as models of causal pathways per se but as repositories of evidence for those pathways.</p
... Many of the key ideas were already in place by the end of the 1970s. The subsequent literature covers a variety of specific techniques to elicit maps from documents, individuals, sets of individuals and groups, with or without software support, following protocols from the purely open-ended to those which use strictly pre-defined lists of factors and links (see Hodgkinson et al (2004) for a comparison of methods), and with aims ranging from strictly idiographic (understanding individuals in specific contexts as Axelrod did) to more nomothetic such as Tegarden et al. (2016). (Axelrod, 1976) Understand and critique decision making ...
Preprint
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p> Evaluators are interested in capturing how things causally influence one another. They are also interested in capturing how stakeholders think things causally influence one another. Causal mapping, the collection, coding and visualisation of interconnected causal claims, has been used widely for several decades across many disciplines for this purpose. It makes the provenance or source of such claims explicit and provides tools for gathering and dealing with this kind of data, and for managing its Janus-like double-life: on the one hand providing information about what people believe causes what and on the other hand preparing this information for possible evaluative judgements about what actually causes what. Specific reference to causal mapping in the evaluation literature is sparse, which we aim to redress here. In particular we address the Janus dilemma by suggesting that causal maps can be understood neither as models of beliefs about causal pathways nor as models of causal pathways per se but as repositories of evidence for those pathways.</p
... Open and low-structured approaches to causal mapping are based on documents (Axelrod, 1976), interviews (Nicolini, 1999) or text-writing tasks (Nadkarni & Narayanan, 2005) that describe and explain distinct phenomena, which can be analyzed by means of content analysis. Structured approaches are used in research designs in which concepts are provided to study participants, either as a fixed concept list (Hodgkinson et al., 2004) or as a pool from which participants can choose (Markóczy & Goldberg, 1995). For instance, using a structured approach, Ford and Hegarty (1984) illustrate that the causal relations of management students and experienced managers show a high level of agreement. ...
Thesis
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Entrepreneurship drives progress, innovation, growth, and prosperity. Passion, in turn, motivates and energizes people to pursue meaningful activities on a sustained basis. In following their passion and in interacting with their proximal environments, people build up competencies, knowledge, experience, and social relations, which may result in peak performance. When passion develops and relates to the creation, discovery and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities, entrepreneurial passion emerges. The current state of research shows that entrepreneurial passion is a source of motivation, inspiration, creativity, and perseverance. Moreover, passion determines people's cognition and behavior and positively impacts their development and success on personal and entrepreneurial levels. In the cultural and creative industries, entrepreneurship often begins from a passion for an artistic or creative work that is pursued as a hobby or leisure activity, which professionalizes over time. Thereby, passion for a creative or artistic activity can also create tensions between ideational and economic-organizational imperatives in entrepreneurial contexts. However, how, and why an artistic or creative passion develops into an entrepreneurial one and how it affects entrepreneurial success is uncharted territory. Hence, the aim of this dissertation is to investigate and explain the development of passion and its effect on entrepreneurial performance of creative people whose venturing ambitions are primarily driven by a non-entrepreneurial passion. To this end, a total of four sequential studies were conducted. The first study identifies the current state of literature on entrepreneurship in the cultural and creative industries. The review elaborates the phenomenon of a non-entrepreneurial passion as central feature of creative industries entrepreneurship and outlines its potential for future research. The second study presents a review of the state of research on passion in the entrepreneurial context and develops a theory-based approach that explains how passion emerges, and how it can extend to entrepreneurship and lead to entrepreneurial performance. Thereby, the proposition arises that the interplay of all interests, activities and goals in a person's life has an impact on the development of passion and its performance potentials. Based on 11 semi- structured interviews with successful entrepreneurs whose life paths are characterized by passion for music, the third study follows this assumption and generates mental maps using the Conceptual Causal Mapping method. The results explain the development of real-life passion over time, its current constitution and embeddedness within the personal, social, and entrepreneurial life context and the relation of passion to performance. The empirical data support the theory-based propositions developed in the second study. Moreover, the results indicate that the existing scales of entrepreneurial passion for founding, inventing, and developing cannot fully and adequately capture the individual real-life constitution of passion. Based on the person-environment fit theory, the final study develops a model that substantiates the positive effects of life context fit on the currently measurable domains of entrepreneurial passion and performance. Life context fit is operationalized using personal project analysis and the hypotheses were tested on a sample of 406 creative entrepreneurs using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results demonstrate the effect of life context fit on entrepreneurial passion and its successive translation into performance in four subsegments that can be classified as artepreneurs, culturepreneurs, creative entrepreneurs, and lifestyle entrepreneurs. However, contrary to expectations, the analyses also indicate that neither the life context fit, nor the domains of entrepreneurial passion have uniform positive outcomes. Rather, these relations occur with compounded positive and negative effects. These results are surprising as the extant literature has found nearly consistent positive outcomes of passion on performance. Post-hoc analyses reveal the varying constitutions of life contexts and the existence of previously unmeasurable domains of entrepreneurial passion for products, for people, and for a social cause among creative practitioners and help explaining the positive and negative combination effects in the segments. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the cultural and creative industries literature, the state of research on passion in entrepreneurship and psychology, and the literature whose epistemological interest aim at capturing and explaining entrepreneurial contexts and environments. Findings reveal (a) the central importance, development, and impact of passion among creative and cultural entrepreneurs, (b) the influence of life context on passion and performance, and (c) the interplay of combined positive and adverse effects of the domains of entrepreneurial passion and their impact on entrepreneurial performance. This implies that future research needs to consider people's life context as an antecedent of passion, especially when performance is the dependent variable. Moreover, new theories are required to better explain how, why, and in what combinations passion negatively affects performance. Future research can start here by analyzing the relations between life context, passion, and performance in other contexts, settings, and industries and by contrasting them with the results of this dissertation. Finally, the findings also have practical implications for people who live a passion as a hobby that might trigger entrepreneurial intentions. They can use the studies to reflect on their passion and to explore potentials and hurdles of an enterprising endeavor. In entrepreneurship education, the mechanisms of passion can also be used to help young people in finding and developing a passionate interest and in becoming a successful entrepreneur.
... Hodgkinson and Healey (2011) maintain that parallel-competitive formulations offer a more nuanced and realistic depiction of organizational decision makers as thinking and feeling beings, the logic of which points to a need for tools and practices that augment not only the cognitive capabilities of organizational decision makers, but also their affective capabilities, on both an individual and collective basis. To this end, Hodgkinson and Healey (2011) advocate the modification of cognitive mapping and related decision aiding techniques, in order to enable the elicitation and representation of decision makers' feelings and affective reactions to strategic issues and choices, rather than the more common practice of focusing on the mapping of strategists' conceptual knowledge per se (e.g., Eden and Ackermann, 1998;Hodgkinson et al., 2004;Huff, 1990). This new generation of knowledge elicitation and decision aiding techniques, based on 'hot cognition enhancing principles', integrates multiple modalities of thought and can be used both for research and intervention purposes (see, e.g., Healey and Hodgkinson, 2017;Hodgkinson et al., 2015). ...
Article
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Psychology-grounded research on heuristics and biases in decision making has become increasingly influential in the field of management studies. However, although this line of inquiry is recognized as a valuable perspective for advancing understanding of decision processes in the upper echelons of firms, extant research remains unbalanced, the bulk of previous endeavours having been focused on managerial overconfidence, with insights from more recent dual-process theory and ecological rationality conceptions of heuristics less explored. This introductory article to the special issue of the Journal of Management Studies, entitled ‘the heuristics and biases of top managers: Past, present, and future’, offers a reflective review of prior work addressing its focal theme and places the articles incorporated into the special issue within this broader context. In addition, it sets out a number of directions for future work, with a view to inspiring the continuing advancement of conceptual and empirical knowledge and management practice. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
... Therefore, the nodes in the cognitive maps represent those strategic issues and the TCSR, while directional edges with strength values represent the causal effect relations between the two nodes. A causal effect could be negative (−) or positive (+), and its weight might be weak (one), moderate (two), or strong (three) (Hodgkinson et al., 2004). Fig. 2 illustrates an example of the cognitive maps in the original data of this study, including positive and negative causal relationships between the elements with associated weights. ...
... 'Causal mapping' (Ackermann & Eden, 2004;Axelrod, 2015;Eden et al., 1992;Laukkanen, 1994;Nadkarni & Shenoy, 2004) has been used quite widely for several decades across a variety of disciplines and fields and provides very useful tools for these tasks. In particular, it has been frequently used in the field of strategic management to not only map but also inform strategic management decision-making (Buckley, 2018;Hodgkinson et al., 2004;Huff, 1990;Laukkanen, 1994). Similar approaches sometimes appear under different names, but reference to it in the evaluation literature is relatively sparse. ...
Chapter
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What do the intended beneficiaries of international development programmes think about the causal drivers of change in their livelihoods and lives? Do their perceptions match up with the theories of change constructed by organizations trying to support them? This case study looks at an entrepreneurship programme aiming to economically empower rural women smallholders in Ghana. The programme provided a combination of financial services, training and peer support to improve the women’s productivity, and purchase and sale options. It was implemented by two Ghanian savings and credit organizations, Opportunity International Savings and Loans, and Sinapi Aba Savings and Loans, with support from the development organization Opportunity International UK (OIUK). We report on a mid-term qualitative evaluation of the programme that used the Qualitative Impact Protocol (QuIP) to gather stories of change directly from the programme participants. These stories were coded, analysed and visualized using a web application called Causal Map.
... mapping is a family of techniques that emerged from Axelrod [2] and was designed for eliciting and representing, systematically, actors' causal beliefs concerning a particular issue or event [31]. Causal maps are representations of causal assertions that generally consist of nodes (which depict concepts) that are linked by arrows (that depict causal relationships) and which come together to form a directed graph [21]. ...
Article
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This article examines the strategic factors influencing how Port Authorities (PAs) make decisions concerning investment to ensure capacity supply in the long term. Rooted in the strategic management literature, we draw upon the capabilities perspective to investigate what critical operational capabilities PAs require to achieve performance and the strategic factors influencing the choice of critical capability development to ensure the long-term capacity supply across different port contexts. Link to full article: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1gcad,714Mqyj7
... Furthermore, mental models offer a snapshot assessment of continually evolving representations that might not necessarily reflect people's attitudes and behaviors in real-world situations. In particular, the elicitation procedure and context, as well as the intervieweeinterviewer relationship, are known to greatly influence the resulting cognitive map [69][70][71]. As a consequence, the ICMs we obtained in our study did not necessarily reflect how respondents frame the Makay SES in their own internal mental model. ...
Article
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The existence of multiple perspectives and representations of different stakeholders poses critical challenges to conservation initiatives worldwide. Thus, to foster more just and sustainable agendas in protected areas (PAs), this diversity of perspectives must be better understood, acknowledged, and tackled. In this article, we aimed to initiate this understanding for the Makay region in Madagascar, a poorly-known region where a ‘New Protected Area’ has been gazetted. In combining mental models and social representation theory, we explored different stakeholders’ perspectives about the Makay social-ecological system, and how differences in stakeholders’ viewpoints could challenge the success of an inclusive, just, and sustainable conservation program. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 32 respondents having different expertise on the Makay. During interviews, respondents were guided towards the elicitation of their individual cognitive map (ICM) of the Makay social-ecological system. ICMs were then analyzed in combining quantitative and qualitative. Respondents described the Makay through a total of 162 components, including 51 components that constituted the central zone of the Makay’s representation. In particular, respondents pointed to insecurity issues caused by zebu thieves, as well as to environmental challenges relative to anthropogenic fires and hunting. On the contrary, they considered mining activities and timber harvesting as more peripheral problems. Through a multivariate clustering analysis, we discriminated two clusters of respondents with contrasting visions about the Makay, ecocentric vs. social-ecological, which was largely influenced by respondents’ background. In comparing the two clusters’ representations, we found that they had dissimilar diagnoses about key socio-environmental challenges in the Makay and how to address them. This ambiguity in respondents’ viewpoints stresses the need to increase research efforts in the Makay region to fill current knowledge gaps about this poorly known social-ecological system, and to foster social learning between stakeholders concerned by the Makay new PA.
... While the psychosocial framework (Kerr et al., 2012), which addresses cognitive and social aspects of roadmapping activities, supported the constructs explored in this study, it points to a need to investigate the sociotechnical implications of digital tools in roadmapping. The bodies of literature investigating the ritualisation of strategy workshops (Bourque and Johnson, 2008) and cognitive mapping (Hodgkinson et al., 2004) can also provide insights to explore this sociotechnical roadmapping perspective. ...
Article
Roadmapping lacks development regarding the application of digital tools. Although roadmapping software is analysed in the literature, it does not address the people-centric characteristics required in workshops. This paper investigates the digitalisation of roadmapping workshops using a psychosocial framework (cogitate, articulate, and communicate). Three research phases were conducted to analyse workshops that replaced physical tools (paper charts, sticky notes, and stickers) with digital tools (interactive display, personal computer, and whiteboard software). The results of this study show that the digital tools used can support co-located roadmapping activities, delivering potential improvements, particularly for creating strategic narratives in the articulate stage.
... In a broad review of knowledge elicitation techniques, the semi-structured interview was still found to be one of the most effective on several criteria, compared to several alternatives (Dieste & Juristo, 2011). Indeed, in the area of idiographic causal mapping specifically, it is argued that this form of data collection should be favored over structured interviews or questionnaires, especially if respondents are to be given the freedom to generate different constructs from each other, as is the case in this research (Eden & Ackermann, 1998;Hodgkinson et al., 2004). However, despite being semi-structured, the interviews followed Aguinis and Solarino's (2019) methodological checklist for executive interviews so that the process maintained due transparency. ...
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Objective of the study: To investigate the differences in the justifications offered by members of senior management for a diversification decision taken by them together.Methodology / approach: The research is configured as an inductive study from an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of an observation unit, focused on the extraction and analysis of aspects of managers' mental models, inserted in the tradition of ideographic causal mapping. The main technique for data collection was the conduction of in-depth semi-structured interviews.Originality / Relevance: This work shows evidence that complements those traditionally presented by the quantitative methodologies that prevail in the study of strategic cognition.Main Results: The results highlight that the professional profile of each manager, especially in terms of his career, is particularly relevant both in the interpretation of his own rationalizations and in that of the others. Making it clear how the functions that each interviewee occupies in the company show an attempt by each manager to justify diversification from the point of view of their own attributions, indicating that the individual rationalization is already done in relation to the emphases expected in the rationalizations of the other members of the organization. team.Theoretical / methodological contributions: It contributed to the understanding of the rationalization of decision-making, by showing the perceptions of each of the managers about a collective decision made in the past and by providing an interpretation of the possible conditions of the individual differences.
... The exercise utilizes a card sorting methodology, which has been used extensively in psychological research to study managers' decision making, belief structures, and mental models (e.g., Barnett, 2008;Budhwar, 2000;Hodgkinson et al., 2004;Lantz et al., 2019). Card sorting tasks require participants to sort cards, each labeled with one item such as tasks, objects, stakeholders, scenarios, or outcomes. ...
Article
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Global value networks are often large, complex, and opaque. Understanding the relationships among stakeholders involved in these networks or organizations can be challenging. This card sort task provides an interactive way to engage participants in questioning the roles of stakeholders who are involved in a business ethics dilemma or an organizational product failure. This card sort task and discussion activity encourages participants to recognize that stakeholders may hold different knowledge, responsibility, or power; identify competing, conflicting, or complementary interests across stakeholders; articulate logical arguments; and engage in debate, compromise, and critical evaluation. This technique has been used successfully with undergraduate and postgraduate business, management, and social science students and is suitable for in-person and remote classes.
... The Behavioral focus on conflicting motivations and self-interests within organi-zations heightened awareness of the fact that decisions are made within complex interactions among individuals, leading to decision outcomes that may be less than optimal from an organizational standpoint. However, the extensive research streams regarding social cognition (Lewicka, 1997;Peeters, Czapinski, & Lewicka, 1992;Porac & Thomas, 1990;Porac & Thomas, 1994;Porac, Thomas, Wilson, Paton, & Kanfer 1995;Reger & Huff, 1993;Reger & Palmer, 1996;Spencer, Peyrefitte, & Churchman, 2003) and mental mapping (Daniels, Johnson, & de Chernatony, 2002;Hodgkinson, 2003;Hodgkinson, Maule, & Brown, 2004) have assumed important positions in extending our understanding of the role that emotion plays in strategic decision making. Huff and her associates have suggested that it may take a combination of approaches to understand more fully strategic decision making (Huff, 1997;Balogun, Huff, & Johnson, 2003). ...
Article
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The use of referent others to establish the concept of competitive cohortsis presented as a way to extend the understanding of strategic decision making inorganizations. The competitive cohort concept does not replace other perspectivesof the firm, industry or strategic group definitions, strategy formulation, or decisionmaking, but rather, helps in understanding how organizational goals are establishedand performance is shaped and measured. The use of the competitive cohort conceptmay also give a new coherency in and view of the concepts of competitive advantageand sustained competitive advantage.
... Based on this assessment, the existence or not of the corresponding causal connection is inferred (c.f. Hodgkinson, Maule, & Bown, 2004). ...
Article
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This paper presents an innovative application of event structure analysis (ESA). The key improvements incorporated on the method are: (i) a robust system for coding events; (ii) the use of causal process tracing tests for inferring necessary connections; (iii) the combination of ESA with network analyses. Finally, we propose five types of analysis for event network models (i.e., critical elements, critical associations, critical connections, critical specific happenings, and critical antecedents) and exemplify some of them in a causal case study about the process of capability construction for open innovation management in an Industrial Electronic Manufacturer.
... Therefore, it is applied in many technical and social sciences (Özesmi and Özesmi 2003). From another aspect, it is the method of observing other mental plans when making fundamental and critical decisions (Hodgkinson, Maule, and Bown 2004). Cognitive mapping contains the experts view on a mental occurrence rather than an actual happening and the ability to quantify such maps. ...
Article
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Considering the increasing importance of social activities in sports, the aim of this study was to design a model of football social responsibility in Iran with a fuzzy cognitive mapping approach. For this purpose the data was collected by 13 in-depth interviews with experts in the field of football social studies in Iran selected through purposive and snowball sampling. By substantive and theoretical coding of interviews, the concepts of football social responsibility were identified and defined. The results showed football social responsibility in Iran includes 8 dimensions of moral, cultural, legal, socio-economic, transparency, benevolently, knowledge and socio-environmental responsibility. Examining the causal relationships between the blocks indicates that moral responsibility has the highest number of effective relationships. Also, the effect of moral responsibility on legal responsibility and transparency responsibility was more important than other relationships. Thus the concept of social responsibility of football can be considered from a broader perspective.
... to, na área de mapeamento causal ideográfico especificamente, argumentase que essa forma de coleta de dados deve ser privilegiada em relação a entrevistas estruturadas ou questionários, especialmente caso se deseje dar liberdade aos respondentes para gerarem construtos diferentes uns dos outros, como é o caso nesta pesquisa (Eden & Ackermann, 1998;G. P. Hodgkinson et al., 2004). No entanto, apesar de serem semiestruturadas, as entrevistas seguiram o checklist metodológico de Aguinis e Solarino (2019) para entrevistas com executivos, a fim de que o processo mantivesse a transparência devida. ...
Conference Paper
Por que membros de uma mesma equipe de alta gestão apresentam diferentes justificativas para uma decisão que foi tomada em conjunto? Como esses próprios membros interpretam essas diferenças individuais nos processos mentais relacionados à racionalização de uma decisão coletiva? Essas são questões de pesquisa importantes para compreender aspectos cognitivo-comportamentais de estrategistas, mas ainda pouco exploradas na literatura da área. Este trabalho lança luz sobre essas problemáticas ao comparar os mapas cognitivos representativos das justificativas individuais de uma decisão de diversificação de negócios tomada coletivamente por uma cúpula estratégica. Os resultados destacam que o perfil profissional de cada gestor, especialmente em termos de sua trajetória, é particularmente relevante tanto na interpretação das próprias racionalizações quanto na dos demais. Além disso, as funções que cada entrevistado ocupa na empresa evidenciam uma tentativa de cada gestor justificar a diversificação sob o ponto de vista de suas próprias atribuições, indicando que a racionalização individual já é feita de forma relativa às ênfases esperadas nas racionalizações dos outros membros da equipe.
... Open and low-structured approaches to causal mapping are based on documents (Axelrod, 1976), interviews (Nicolini, 1999) or text-writing tasks (Nadkarni and Narayanan, 2005) that describe and explain distinct phenomena, which can be analyzed by means of content analysis. Structured approaches are used in research designs in which concepts are provided to study participants, either as a fixed concept list (Hodgkinson et al., 2004) or as a pool from which participants can choose (Markóczy and Goldberg, 1995). For instance, using a structured approach, Ford and Hegarty (1984) illustrate that the causal relations of management students and experienced managers show a high level of agreement. ...
Article
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Purpose - Non-entrepreneurial passions may be the beginning of an extensive entrepreneurial journey. However, current passion theories cannot fully capture the essence of such passions and their effects. The purpose of this study is to explore and explain the real-life composition of passion and performance. Design/methodology/approach - The investigation was conducted with comparative causal mapping on a qualitative sample of people we designate rock 'n' roll entrepreneurs (i.e., individuals driven by a passion for music, and who are successful both artistically and economically). Aggregated causal maps of passion elicited through semi-structured interviews were analyzed and contrasted with performance indicators. Findings - Passion is revealed to be an individual phenomenon, one composed of central and peripheral concepts that include-contrary to prior theories-personality traits and life contexts. Furthermore, the results suggest that the concordance of concepts determines the scope, degree, and performance of passion. Research limitations/implications - This study complements prevailing passion theories in psychology and entrepreneurship. As a context-bound study, the generalizability of the results is limited to its context, which, however, paves a clear way for future research. Practical implications - Creative economy entrepreneurs and educators can use the mechanism of concordance to consciously reflect passion driven tensions between artistic, social and entrepreneurial demands and to translate passion into behavioral effectiveness. Originality/value-This study is the first to use a comparative causal mapping approach to investigate passion. Findings highlight the potential to research entrepreneurial phenomena at the intersection of emotion, cognition, and action.
... The linkage (edge) between two nodes represented the direction of the effect, and its weight the strength of the causality. The effect might be positive (+) or negative (−), and its strength could be one (weak), two (moderate), or three (strong) (Gerard, John, & Nicola, 2004). In this case, positive and negative weights of edges were taken into account when an increase of the causal variable decreased the effect variable, and when an increase of the causal variable increased the effect variable, respectively. ...
Article
Strategic management researchers have long been fascinated with company performance in terms of underlying managerial cognition and its interpretation. This paper presents a methodology to examine the linkage between the cognition of individuals and company performance. We link cognitive maps with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and examined the role of standard and newly proposed consistency and coverage formulas in the evaluation of social science data. We investigate the effect of cognitive diversity within a company, and between companies within an industry on company performance using experimental and real-life data. The proposed method used a cognitive mapping approach to elicit strategy frames from individuals in management teams and operationalized their cognitive diversity by distance ratios between individual- and group-level cognitive maps. The results highlight the different opportunities of cognitive diversity to the enhancement of company performance in the market and confirm the usefulness of new fsQCA consistency and coverage measures.
... Wecombinednomotheticandideographiccausalmappingtechniquesfordatacollectionand elicitation of managerial cognitive maps (Axelrod, 1976;Eden, 2004;Hodgkinson et al., 2004;Tyler&Gnyawali,2009;Leeetal.,2015).Toanalyzethecreatedcognitivemapsandtomeasure cognitivediversityamongtheparticipantsofthestudy,firstly,weusedtheoriginalLSWformula12 (Langfield-Smith&Wirth,1992),andnexttheLSWformulamodifiedbyuscomputingthenon-metric distanceratiosforeachboardmemberandaggregatedthemintofirmandindustrylevels.Finally, weinvestigatedtheinfluenceofdemographiccharacteristicsoncognitivediversityamongtheboard members,andfinally,linkedtheseresultswiththefinancialdatacollectedthroughtheyears2012-2016 (Hambrick&Mason,1984;Lawrence,1997;Kilduffetal.,2000;Tyler&Gnyawali,2009). ...
Article
Increasing pace of technological change in the energy sector towards more sustainable solutions has raised the importance of managers’ abilities to notice and interpret changes in their environments, and translate those perspectives into strategic choices. Consequently, this study aims to examine managerial interpretation on changing business environment providing insights into the relationship of cognitive diversity, board composition, and performance differences across the cleantech firms. Our empirical study employs both indirect and direct cognitive measures for analysis of cognitive maps collected through surveys from the boards of nine cleantech firms. The study utilizes the hybrid cognitive mapping technique with distance ratio to investigate cognitive diversity and bridges it with the firms’ performance differences. By doing so, the study also advances and operationalizes the distance ratio as a measure for analysis of cognitive maps to utilize more information available in the maps. The results indicate that the managerial characteristics showing firm-level economic expertise create high-level cognitive diversity and high financial volatility in performance among the cleantech firms. Keywords: cognition, cognitive mapping, distance ratio, demographics, sustainability, cleantech industry
... There have been a whole host of diverse techniques applied to attempt to elicit people's MMs (Carley &Palmquist, 1992;Grenier & Dudzinsk-Przesmitzki, 2015;Jones et al., 2011). Critical reviews of these techniques can be found in Carley and Palmquist (1992), Hodgkinson, Maule and Brown (2004), and Jones et al. (2011). The classic methods were of one of three types: Content analysis (Namenwirth, & Weber 1986;Stone, Dunphy, Smith, & Ogilvie, 1966), procedural mapping (Leinhardt, 1988;vanLehn, & Brown, 1980) and task analysis (Ericsson, & Simon, 1980;Newell, & Simon, 1972), and cognitive mapping (Naveh-Benjamin, McKeachie, Yi-Guang, & Tucker, 1986;Reitman, & Rueter, 1980;Shavelson, 1972). ...
Thesis
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Recent research within the field of natural resource management has been devoted to studying the cognitive structures, called mental models, that guide people’s thoughts, actions, and decision-making. Artificial lighting threatens the sustainability of pristine night skies around the world and is growing worldwide at an average rate of six-percent per year. Despite these trends, stakeholders’ mental models of night skies have been unexplored. This study will address this gap by eliciting stakeholders’ mental models of dark skies. Scenario planning has become a pervasive tool across diverse sectors to analyze complex systems for making decisions under uncertainty. The theory of scenario planning hypothesizes that scenario planning contributes to learning and improves upon participants’ mental models. However, there have been scant empirical studies attempting to investigate these two claims. Stakeholders’ mental models of dark skies were mapped while simultaneously testing the hypotheses that participation in scenario planning results in more complex mental models and alters environmental attitudes. Twenty-one Arizona stakeholders participated in one of two workshops during September 2016. Three identical surveys were given to measure knowledge, environmental attitudes and mental model change during the workshops. Knowledge gain peaked during the introductory lecture and continued to increase during the workshop. Scenario planning increased participants’ environmental attitudes from anthropocentric to nature-centered and was found to have a significant positive impact on dark sky advocates’ change in mental model complexity. The most prominent drivers affecting dark skies were identified using social network analysis of the pre and post mental models. The most prominent concepts were altered significantly from pre to post workshop suggesting that scenario planning may aid practitioners in understanding exogenous factors to their area of expertise. These findings have critical theoretical and managerial implications of mental model alteration, environmental attitudes, and the future of Arizona’s night skies. A revised theoretical framework is offered to include environmental attitudes into the theory of scenario planning and a conceptual framework was created to illustrate the most salient drivers affecting or being affected by dark skies
... Afterwards, we transformed the verbal notes and reflection reports into visual cognitive maps (Fiol & Huff, 1992;Hodgkinson, Maule, & Bown, 2004). These maps facilitated the separation of each search process data into single units. ...
... Causal analysis strategies are effective, in part, to the extent that they direct one's attention towards useful causal information (S. G. B. Johnson & Keil, 2014), help avoid biases and cognitive errors (Dörner & Schaub, 1994;Mumford, Schultz, & Van Doorn, 2001), result in more accurate mental models (Hodgkinson et al., 2004;Strange & Mumford, 2013), and increase leader performance (Marcy & Mumford, 2010). Based on a review of relevant literature, Marcy and Mumford (2007) identified seven heuristics leaders might use to identify more useful causal information. ...
... Managerial mental models are organized knowledge structures or simplified cognitive representations that managers use to understand business and its environment (Gary and Wood, 2011). Prior studies have also used terms such as cognitive maps, causal maps, dominant logic, frames and belief systems (Hodgkinson et al., 2004;Knight et al., 1999;Simon, 1991) in analogy to mental models. Managers conceptualize their business and build cause-and-effect understandings about the environment based on their mental models (Barr et al., 1992;Prahalad and Bettis, 1986). ...
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Behavioral strategy has emerged as one of the most important currents in contemporary strategic management. But, what is it? Where does it come from? Why is it important? This Element provides a review of key streams in behavioral, interpreting behavioral strategy as a consistently microfoundational approach to strategy that is grounded in evidence-based insight in behaviors and interaction. We show that there is considerable room for furthering the microfoundations of behavioral strategy and point to research opportunities and methods that may realize this aim. The Element is of interest to strategy scholars in general, and to Ph.D. students in strategy research in particular.
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We investigated the role of heuristics in decision making in infrequent and heterogeneous organizational processes. In our multiple‐case study, we tracked individual managers’ knowledge, how managers collectively articulated and codified knowledge, and how they used it in mergers and acquisitions decision‐making. We developed a process model that explains (a) the evolution and the interplay between heuristics and causal knowledge, and (b) the implications of these processes for decision making. More precisely, we found that some managers possessed and used rough heuristics—heuristics developed via limited or nonexistent first‐hand experience. Because rough heuristics were often faulty, they led to errors if used in a different context. In contrast, other managers possessed and used causal knowledge—knowledge explaining causal regularities in the environment. Causal knowledge was associated with higher quality decision‐making and better performance in subsequent acquisitions. The problem that our focal companies faced was that causal knowledge often evaporated during attempts at collective articulation and codification, causing the conversion of causal knowledge into rough heuristics. We contribute to the organizational heuristics literature by improving our understanding of the role of heuristics in infrequent and heterogeneous organizational processes. At a more general level, we contribute to the capabilities development literature by identifying three paths that capabilities development can take. We also offer important implications for managers.
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This chapter proposes the Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) approach as a useful methodological tool in studying the complex phenomenon of workplace spirituality. The FCM approach allows researchers to estimate and visualise causal relationships that reflect complex decision-making processes, especially in the face of adversity. More specifically, various coping mechanisms are examined in workplace spirituality research in relation to organisational resilience and sustainability. However, little evidence is offered of whether and how the various coping mechanisms interact with each other and structure complex decision-making problems, resulting in either productive or non-productive outcomes. I suggest that this is because there is no accessible template for employing the technique with the types of data researchers tend to encounter. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the FCM approach and some practical recommendations on how scholars can employ FCM by using two examples studying organisational resilience. Implications for future research are considered.KeywordsSpiritualityFuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM)Fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs)DisruptionOrganisational resilience
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The changing world contains more and more complex systems every day. This causes the interactions occurring within the system to result in different and unpredictable results than expected. Although the existence of self-organized teams is an important proposition in the concept of "Agile", which was put forward for the ability to survive in a globally competitive environment full of uncertainties, it is observed that some leadership characteristics that arise naturally within the team have a positive effect on performance. In this study, agile leadership characteristics that emerged in the changing world were revealed with a model created with the Cognitive Mapping Method. The distinctive features of the changing world enable people to acquire new features by using their innate personality traits. While some of these features are learned features, some of them provide the emergence of agile leadership. The factors used in the model are grouped under four headings. 1) Characteristics of the Changing World 2) Intrinsic Personality Traits 3) Learned Personal Traits 4) Emerging Leadership Traits. Those who want to do research on this subject in the future can reach results that contribute to the literature with an expert sample space that includes more crowded and different target groups, based on the relationships in this model.
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Causal mapping has long been valued as a tool for exploring individuals’ idiosyncratic beliefs. in this paper we do three things to make these benefits more utilizable by researchers. First, by detailing a replicable elicitation technique, we lay the ground for systematic and objective comparison of these beliefs: Systematic analysis and comparison require systematic elicitation. Secondly, through a careful analysis of what a causal map means, we have been able to refine a way of comparing maps which uses all of the available information within the maps and is objective in the sense that all subjective aspects of the method are made explicit (e.g., the pool of constructs, the interpretation of missing information, etc.). Thirdly, we discuss and extend various tools for analyzing the distance based measures which the comparison yields. In addition, a brief example of the use of the method is sketched.
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Cognitive mapping techniques refer to methods used to elicit the structure and content of people's mental models. There is a growing interest in applying these techniques to the study of managers' mental models of strategic management issues. This paper reports on a new method for mapping managers' mental models of competitive industry structures, that is based upon recent developments in the cognitive psychology of the categorization of concepts. This method, a simple visual card sorting technique, is quick to administer and interpret. The method is evaluated with respect to its psychometric properties against the well established, but potentially cumbersome, repertory grid technique. The method is demonstrated to have good validity by comparing it with the repertory grid technique.
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In his critique of Daniels et al. (2002), Hodgkinson (2001a) raises a number of issues concerning the use and comparison of ideographic cognitive maps. Hodgkinson claims that there are problems associated with global similarity ratings, and that ideographic methods should be replaced by methods that have some nomothetic component. In reply, we show that the specific issues raised by Hodgkinson are not at all problematic in the context of the research questions addressed by Daniels et al. We examine Hodgkinson's proposed alternative and explain why it would not be appropriate for the questions addressed by Daniels et al. We then argue that Hodgkinson' s approach, far from being a panacea for problems in cognitive mapping research, will deflect from the issues of real debate in this area.
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From institutional theory, we argue (a) that the competitive, or task environment may encourage divergence of management cognition between organizations, management functions and amongst senior managers, and (b) that the institutional environment may encourage cognitive convergence at the level of the industry, the strategic group and within institutionalized practices linked to management functions and level. Using management cognition of competition as a vehicle and two cognitive mapping methods, we test a series of competing propositions amongst 32 managers in the UK personal financial services industry, an industry that evidences both task and institutional characteristics. Our findings indicate neither the superiority of exclusively task nor institutional explanations of management cognition. However, the results do indicate some influence of the institutional environment, most noticeably through the convergence of mental models within middle managers across the industry. The results also indicate some influence of the task environment, through cognitive differences across organizations and greater differentiation amongst senior managers' mental models. We interpret our results by referring to the usefulness of distinguishing between task and institutional environments in management cognition and strategic management research.
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An illustration is presented of the use of cognitive mapping technique to examine the behavior and perceptions of individual decision-makers. A cognitive map is representation of the subjective decision-making environment of an individual. Seven military officers each played two scenarios in a research wargame. Analysis of their communications in the game showed that individual players were remarkably consistent over the two scenarios, but their perceptions of their common decision-making environment differed noticeably. Differences related to the size and complexity of their cognitive maps, the detailed interpretation of the maps, the players' confidence and anticipation of the future and the way in which the maps were altered as time progressed.
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Drawing from recent developments in social cognition, cognitive psychology, and behavioral decision theory, we analyzed when and how the act of measuring beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors affects observed correlations among them. Belief, attitude, or intention can be created by measurement if the measured constructs do not already exist in long-term memory. The responses thus created can have directive effects on answers to other questions that follow in the survey. But even when counterparts to the beliefs, attitudes, and intentions measured already exist in memory, the structure of the survey researcher's questionnaire can affect observed correlations among them. The respondent may use retrieved answers to earlier survey questions as inputs to response generation to later questions. We present a simple theory predicting that an earlier response will be used as a basis for another, subsequent response if the former is accessible and if it is perceived to be more diagnostic than other accessible inputs. We outline the factors that determine both the perceived diagnosticity of a potential input, the likelihood that it will be retrieved, and the likelihood that some alternative (and potentially more diagnostic) inputs will be retrieved. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Tested the 2-process theory of detection, search, and attention presented by the current authors (1977) in a series of experiments. The studies (a) demonstrate the qualitative difference between 2 modes of information processing: automatic detection and controlled search; (b) trace the course of the learning of automatic detection, of categories, and of automatic-attention responses; and (c) show the dependence of automatic detection on attending responses and demonstrate how such responses interrupt controlled processing and interfere with the focusing of attention. The learning of categories is shown to improve controlled search performance. A general framework for human information processing is proposed. The framework emphasizes the roles of automatic and controlled processing. The theory is compared to and contrasted with extant models of search and attention. (31/2 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Reviews literature on the dual coding theory (DCT) of memory and cognition, beginning with the origin and development of DCT from 1963 to 1986. General and specific criticisms of DCT and research findings are also addressed, focusing on alternative views that emphasize abstract propositional representations as the basis of cognition. The review deals with the origins of DCT in research related to the conceptual peg hypothesis of concreteness and imagery effects on associative memory. The review also discusses empirical and conceptual responses to recent criticisms of DCT and alternative theoretical views in areas related to concreteness effects on memory, schema theory, and conceptual issues in the philosophy of science. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Two experiments investigated 2 possible boundary conditions for the assumption that an attitude toward a task has been formed when measurements are taken. In Exp I, 28 undergraduates were used to explore the effects of time for reflection on the formation of attitudes toward tasks. Ss worked at a computer-administered in-basket exercise. Each problem was described in detail and followed by a series of multiple-choice questions and performance feedback. Performance scores were held constant across Ss. Time for reflection was manipulated by adjusting the pace at which the task was presented. Results show that the behavior attitude (as measured by a self-report) correlation for Ss given ample time to reflect was greater than for those denied time for reflection. In Exp II, the role of self-involving tasks in stimulating more attitude formation was studied using 56 graduate business students. Results show that involvement was a condition for attitude formation in tasks. It is suggested that under limited time and low-involvement conditions, attitude formation may occur only reactively in response to the attitude measure. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Research on managerial cognition in genetal, and on cognitive mapping in particular, is receving a great deal of attention in Europe and the US, but the work being done is currently disparate and loosely coupled. Furthermor, the development of maps as a decision aid has tended to focus on specific sub-areas of cognition. In this article we argue that the broad strategic concerns of managers require a portfolio of different kinds of cognitive maps. The interactions among these maps are as important as the functions of each one separately. We develop a framework for classifying cognitice maps and argue for the importance of managing multiple maps.
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Reviews evidence which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes (a) unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response, and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. (86 ref)
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Ever since Hambrick and Mason suggested that external individual characteristics can be used as substitutes for individuals' cognitive bases, management researchers have been using these characteristics as proxies for cognition. However, the actual evidence for a relationship between cognitive bases and individual characteristics is equivocal at best. My study of 91 managers showed a relationship between some of the most cited characteristics and beliefs, but I argue that such a finding does not support substituting characteristics for cognition.
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This paper examines the use of influence diagrams to help understand political processes within organizations. This technique is illustrated through a case study of a new extended care facility connected to a hospital. Advantages of influence diagrams are highlighted by comparing the level of understanding before and after the technique was used. The improvement in performance that may be derived from the use of influence diagrams is discussed. Finally, the implications of the case for important issues in organization theory, particularly those dealing with internal politics and conflict, are discussed.
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Causal mapping has long been valued as a tool for exploring individuals' idiosyncratic beliefs. In this paper we do three things to make these benefits more utilizable by researchers. First, by detailing a replicable elicitation technique, we lay the ground for systematic and objective comparison of these beliefs: Systematic analysis and comparison require systematic elicitation. Secondly, through a careful analysis of what a causal map means, we have been able to refine a way of comparing maps which uses all of the available information within the maps and is objective in the sense that all subjective aspects of the method are made explicit (e.g., the pool of constructs, the interpretation of missing information, etc.). Thirdly, we discuss and extend various tools for analyzing the distance based measures which the comparison yields. In addition, a brief example of the use of the method is sketched.
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In their study designed to investigate the relative impact of 'task and institutional influences on managers' mental models of competition,' Daniels et al. (2002) elicited cognitive maps using two complementary ideographic mapping procedures: a card-sort technique and a variant of the repertory grid. Given that the resulting individual maps were each based on differing organizations and attributes, Daniels and his colleagues assessed belief similarity - their key dependent variable - by asking their participants to rate the overall similarity of the various maps so elicited to their own mental models which prevailed at the time the comparative rating exercise was subsequently performed, some three to six months later. Drawing on research into the cognitive processes underpinning similarity judgements, I argue that this approach to the comparison of cognitive maps suffers from a number of severe limitations which are likely to bias the results in favour of the research hypotheses under test, thus leading to increased type I errors. Alternative procedures for eliciting and comparing individuals' mental representations of competition are briefly considered.
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A causal cognitive map is a directed network representation of an individual's beliefs concerning a particular domain at a point of time. The nodes and the arcs joining them indicate causal beliefs. There have been few attempts to develop quantitative measures for such maps. The measures could be used to compare the maps of different individuals and also to track the changes in the beliefs of a single individual over time. They would assist in providing a more objective basis for qualitative analysis. In this paper we review current cognitive mapping research and then propose some measures for computing the difference between two maps, illustrating this work with a managerial example.
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This article describes a theoretical and empirical study of the Utrecht Jazz Orchestra. The research represents a radically new approach to organization analysis, based on a study of the participants' cause maps. We begin the analysis by ranking the variables of the average cause map and then, using these ranks, unfold the map into a content-free graph called an etiograph. This unfolding corresponds to an ordering of the variables interpretable in terms of organizations. The location of the variables in the etiograph has a strong association with the level of the participants' perceived influence over the situation, as well as with the number of logical inconsistencies in the participants' construction of the situation. Moreover, etiographic analysis ranks variables plausibly in a sequence of three clusters of givens, means, and ends. The analysis also covers the effect of requesting knowledge known with certainty, as well as the extent of the congruence between the participants' and an observer's conceptions of the setting. Finally, cross-validation analysis, using a holdout sample, supports the major findings.
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Differences and similarities of managerial beliefs were measured in a Hungarian-American joint venture using causal maps. The relative influence of nationality, functional area and other characteristics of managers was investigated and it was found that functional area seems to have more importance in explaining similarities and differences in the business beliefs of managers than nationality does.
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Wright and Goodwin (2002) maintain that, in terms of experimental design and ecological validity, Hodgkinson et al. (1999) failed to demonstrate either that the framing bias is likely to be of salience in strategic decision making, or that causal cognitive mapping provides an effective means of limiting the damage accruing from this bias. In reply, we show that there is ample evidence to support both of our original claims. Moreover, using Wright and Goodwin's own data set, we demonstrate that our studies did in fact attain appropriate levels of ecological validity, and that their proposed alternative to causal cognitive mapping, a decision tree approach, is far from ‘simpler.’ Wright and Goodwin's approach not only fails to eliminate the framing bias—it leads to confusion. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Fundamentals of MDS.- The Four Purposes of Multidimensional Scaling.- Constructing MDS Representations.- MDS Models and Measures of Fit.- Three Applications of MDS.- MDS and Facet Theory.- How to Obtain Proximities.- MDS Models and Solving MDS Problems.- Matrix Algebra for MDS.- A Majorization Algorithm for Solving MDS.- Metric and Nonmetric MDS.- Confirmatory MDS.- MDS Fit Measures, Their Relations, and Some Algorithms.- Classical Scaling.- Special Solutions, Degeneracies, and Local Minima.- Unfolding.- Unfolding.- Avoiding Trivial Solutions in Unfolding.- Special Unfolding Models.- MDS Geometry as a Substantive Model.- MDS as a Psychological Model.- Scalar Products and Euclidean Distances.- Euclidean Embeddings.- MDS and Related Methods.- Procrustes Procedures.- Three-Way Procrustean Models.- Three-Way MDS Models.- Modeling Asymmetric Data.- Methods Related to MDS.