IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-00464009.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

CEO Ambivalence and Responses to Strategic Issues

Author

Listed:
  • Nils Plambeck

    (GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • K. Weber

Abstract

We examine how executives' ambivalent evaluation of a strategic issue relates to organizational actions taken in response. Ambivalence occurs when a decision maker evaluates an issue as simultaneously positive and negative, a state that has received scant attention in organizational research. We integrate findings in social psychology with the behavioral theory of the firm to suggest how executives' ambivalence prompts wider and more vigorous search for action responses and enables broader participation. Data from a two-wave survey of 104 German CEOs who evaluated the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and reported their organizations' responses show that organizations whose CEOs evaluated the event as both positive and negative were more likely to take action when both evaluations were also strongly held. The reported actions were also of greater scope, novelty, and riskiness. The study contributes to research on organizational decision making by theorizing the role of top executives' ambivalence and by providing a first systematic test of how ambivalence affects responses to strategic issues

Suggested Citation

  • Nils Plambeck & K. Weber, 2009. "CEO Ambivalence and Responses to Strategic Issues," Post-Print hal-00464009, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00464009
    DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1090.0471
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00464009. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.