engleski

Strategic Thinking: Refining the Definition and Discovering a Typology

Strategic thinking, within the literature of strategic management, has over the past decade become a topic of considerable academic interest ; so popular in fact that one author refers to it as an overused concept and under defined term (Sloan, 2006). If true, this characterization is of interest to a relatively small community of researchers because for most scholars’ strategic thinking is a self-understood concept that exists in every single model, concept, theory and approach in the field of strategic management. As with most topics subjected to debate, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In this article we investigate the underlying intellectual and process content of the term “strategic thinking” via a comprehensive literature review and analysis. The article provides a glimpse of misunderstandings and confusion that are often too closely associated with strategic thinking. As a consequence of this review we then propose a definition of strategic thinking placing particular emphasis on the part it plays in the formulation and implementation of business strategy. Having developed and presented a formal definition we report results of an empirical research project designed to investigate the utility of treating strategic thinking as a multi-dimensional construct composed of discrete elements or types. Using data from a sample of European top managers from a variety of industries we use factor analysis to sort and verify the existence of varieties of strategic thinking. As a consequence we are able to present a new approach to strategic thinking by showcasing typologies of strategic thinking that can be taken into account for further research of strategic thinking capability. The contribution of the paper is in taking the strategic thinking debate one step further toward a unified definition of strategic thinking and suggesting a strategic thinking typology useful to researchers, practicing leaders, and executive development specialists.

strategic thinking; definition; typology

nije evidentirano