1942: Strategic Responsiveness Through Planning, Autonomous Actions, and Interactive Control Systems

The combined roles of strategic planning and decentralized decision-making remain an essential issue in strategy research and its resolution has real implications for management practice. To this end the current study considers the related influences of the corporate leadership style and interactive controls and uncovers new interesting insights. We use structural equation analyses to investigate these more fine grained relationships based on an updated cross-sectional dataset from among the largest companies in Denmark. This investigation considers the often ignored effects of interactive control systems and the downplayed role of the leadership style enacted by top management and thereby extends our current understanding of the complex strategy-making processes. The analyses find that a participative leadership style drives the application of interactive controls, which in turn has a positive interactive effect on the relationship between strategic planning and corporate performance. The participative leadership style also has a positive influence on autonomous strategic actions, which in turn has a negative relationship to performance. We discuss the theoretical foundation for these intricate relationships and use these findings to consider the wider implications and opportunities to extract further insights from this new comprehensive dataset.