article about how uncertainty impacts teams behavior

Becoming Aware of the Unknown: Decision Making During the Implementation of a Strategic Initiative

Ronald Klingebiel and Arnoud De Meyer

Organization Science 
Vol. 24, No. 1 (January-February 2013), pp. 133-153

Published by: INFORMS

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23362104

Strategic initiatives are projects that are crucial for organizations’ future success, and they are usually associated with organizational strategic goals. In order to execute those initiatives for organizational strategic goals, managers have to make decisions on how they should behave differently based on different situations. Prior researches suggest that decision makers usually have a set of preconceived behaviors that they prefer to follow when they have enough information that are related to their decisions. When they lack information, they will then change their preconceived behaviors to make the best decision based on the information they gathered, which is defined as adaptive decision-making. However, these researches did not address how managers decide to adapt and what impact them to choose to either stick to plans or learn by doing when they implement strategic initiatives. In the study of Klingebiel and Meyer, they want to find out why the managers decided to adapt and what impact them to adapt. They find out that when the future is uncertain, managers tend to be more selective, deliberate and diligent to change their behaviors. They also find out that analytical comprehensiveness in adaptive decision-making is higher than preconceived decision-making when the future is uncertain.