How is Strategy Formed in Organizations? A Multi-Disciplinary Taxonomy of Strategy-Making Approaches

This paper presents an integrative framework for understanding organizational direction and the strategy-making process, developed primarily from the roles of top managers and employees in the strategy-making process. The paper offers a multi-disciplinary taxonomy of several themes from historical models of strategy formulation and implementation in the organization theory, political science, public policy, and strategic management literatures. Five approaches to strategy making are identified: autocratic, transformational, rational, learning, and political. Descriptions of each strategy-making approach, roles of top managers and employees of the organization for each, and proposed contingent factors for prevalence and effectiveness of each approach are discussed.