How visible is the visible hand of top management in strategic renewals? Guided evolution and the intraorganizational ecology model of adaptation

This article presents a formal model of an organization that faces a process of strategic renewal. By simulating the model, the role of the top management is investigated in guiding internal entrepreneurship in an intraorganizational ecology of strategic initiatives. The simulation study advances received strategy-process literature in three ways. First, it clarifies the role that slack resources play within a web of interacting variables. Second, the study indicates the behavioral features of the top management that are desirable to appropriately calibrate slack flows. More specifically, two constructs are described: (i) time to adapt core business expectations and (ii) time to react to change in expectations, which capture the top management’s capability to produce accurate expectations and to buttress appropriate reaction to change in those expectations. Third, the article integrates the interaction among top managers’ agency, evolutionary forces, and self-organization in the strategy process.