Discussions of dominant logic thus far have focused at a general level. We use the term to refer to the mindset, casual map, or mental model of the top management team. However, the exact contents in the dominant logic are usually left unspecified. Most of the time, we assume dominant logic represents the strategic concepts and causal relations among these concepts because it is mostly applied to illustrate the strategies used by management teams. Of course, given strategic success, this logic condenses into many other visible and invisible features of the organization.
We want to focus briefly on the processes that top management teams develop to make decisions. Top management teams often develop stable ways of making strategic decisions. Like most other teams, top management team members over time develop a process logic that guides how they voice opinions, seek information, resolve differences, and make the final decision. Previous experiences, political dynamics, preference of the CEO, and interactions among members influence the process logic that emerges. Once created, the process logic as a component of the dominant logic endures and guides how strategic decisions are made. Unlike the issue-oriented aspects of a dominant logic that focuses on strategic concepts and their causal relationships, a process dominant logic focuses on the team processes involved in the top management team.
Considering the process aspects of dominant logic suggests a richer construct than is often envisioned. In addition to strategic issues logic, it also relates to the management team’s model of how decision making should take place, and/or how information should be processed within the team. For instance, in Eisenhardt’s (1989) study of decision making in high velocity environments, she found that top management teams in successful firms use more information, develop more alternatives, engage in a two-tiered advice process, and employ quick conflict resolution methods.
We believe that the study of the process aspects of dominant logic in top management teams represents a productive ground for future research. As shown in Eisenhardt’s study, the decision-making process in top management teams is a key differentiator of successful and unsuccessful firms. So far, most of the discussion of dominant logic has been focused on how heuristics that capture rules of dealing with strategy develop and persist. We believe that it would be equally rewarding to turn research attention to the process aspects of logics that prevail in top management teams. By determining how information is sought and processed, process logics influence how information, knowledge, and opinions are combined to form the final strategic decision. Hence, the process logic of a top management team could help to explain why a particular decision is reached. More importantly, as we move toward more turbulent environments, it would be interesting to explore the types of process dominant logics that would allow members to more accurately sense new changes in the environment, and effectively integrate members’ expertise to invent new responses.
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1‘On an intuitive level, coherence is a matter of how the beliefs in a system of beliefs fit together or “dovetail” with each other, so as to constitute one unified and tightly structured whole. And it is clear that this fitting together depends on logical, inferential, and explanatory relations of many different sorts among the components of the system’ (Bonjour, 1985: 107).