Conjoint Effects of Interacting Strategy-making Processes and Lines of Defense Practices in Strategic Risk Management: An Empirical Study

The ability to contain adverse effects of major risks under turbulent conditions and exploit the opportunities they present are fundamental concerns in strategic management and various institutions promote enterprise risk management (ERM) to deal with these challenges. Yet, our knowledge about how ERM affects performance and interacts with corporate strategy-making processes is limited. The ERM frameworks impose first and second lines of defense practices to integrate business operations and corporate risk oversight. Emergent strategies generate responsive initiatives and strategic planning coordinates updated actions. Hence, this study analyzes the conjoint effects of these ERM practices and strategy-making processes based on a large corporate sample and finds that ERM practices depend on strategy-making to attain effective risk outcomes. The application of ERM frameworks can, therefore, not be assessed in isolation, but must consider corporate strategy-making. This has implications for the way we conduct research on strategic risk management, how executives approach risk oversight and policy-makers impose formal risk governance requirements.