"Behavioral failures are impediments to firms’ abilities to compete for opportunities. Such failures are behavioral insofar as these impediments are mental in origin. Behavioral failures can be viewed in terms of limits to strategic leaders’ abilities to manage and overcome such mental impediments.
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These failures revolve around three key dimensions: rationality, plasticity, and shaping ability.
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Rationality. Strategic opportunities must reflect asymmetries between prices and the rent-generating potential of some of their constituent elements. The first necessary condition for eliminating such discrepancies is that competing economic agents have the ability to spot all undervalued courses of action. This condition requires that competing agents can identify all possible courses of action and accurately evaluate them. If this condition is not met, untapped opportunities can remain ignored by firms, even if competition is intense. Because of the resulting lack of competition for these opportunities, the market prices for some of their constituent elements will not converge to their true values.
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economic agents are generally myopic; they are more reliable and effective at identifying and predicting the outcomes of courses of action that lie in the neighborhood of their firm’s current activities than they are at finding and estimating outcomes of more distant ones.
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distant foresight is not impossible, but it involves mental processes that are more difficult to perform reliably.
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Plasticity. Full rationality is necessary but not sufficient to negate opportunities. Competing firms might be fully rational and know where superior opportunities lie, but they might also be inert and thus unable to act on and compete for such opportunities. In landscape terms, agents could know the entire landscape and decide to act on a specific opportunity, but their firm might unexpectedly get stuck on its way to the peak because of bounded plasticity, with dire effects on its survival prospects. In this case, when identifying a superior opportunity does not translate or translates only partially into competitive behavior, the discrepancies between elements’ current and true values would remain or be eliminated only after major time lags. The theoretical condition for superior opportunities to be absent must therefore also encompass a lack of bounds in firms’ plasticity.
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It was argued that most local opportunities are noticed. Even if inertial forces prevent some firms from acting on such opportunities, the fact that many profitseeking players spot and decide to pursue the same or similar opportunities attenuates, in the aggregate, these forces’ impact on competition for them. This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that incremental changes typically face less resistance than long jumps do. Consequently, existing opportunities tend to be distant.
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Accordingly, if valuable opportunities are hard to find within firms’ current basins of attraction, firms will have to adopt novel representations in order to pursue them. To the extent that the strategic representation is well established and central to the firm’s identity, that firm’s pursuit of the novel opportunity will likely violate some elements of its own identity. This pursuit is problematic. Identity-violating changes are typically destabilizing and associated with high mortality rates because they generally trigger cultural opposition or asperity, especially when central identity codes are infused with moral value, have an emotional component,
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“If a leader tries to march toward strange destinations, the organization is likely to deflect the effort.”
Here, “strange” can be interpreted as violating taken-for granted identity codes.
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In addition, identity violations imply complex changes. Firms’ strategic representations are at the core of what firms do. Violating them usually sets off cascades of changes that generally require firms both to acquire new capabilities at the subsystem level, which is difficult, and to change the architecture governing said subsystems, which poses more challenges.
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Shaping Ability. Full rationality and full plasticity together are still not sufficient to negate the existence of opportunities. Competing firms might be fully rational and fully plastic but substantially bounded in their ability to legitimize new courses of action. Even if the identification of a superior opportunity translates into competitive behavior, firms’ inability to legitimize it means that discrepancies between some of the current values of its elements and their potential values are preserved.
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Opportunities are not just out there, ready to be plucked. Courses of action that can be superior often require proactive efforts to shape selection criteria for their potential to be expressed.
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To meet the condition of unbounded shaping ability, a firm must have unbounded ability to shape the sociocognitive processes that persuade multiple parties (which are only partially known) that a particular conception or course of action is viable. It is implausible that this requirement is met fully, particularly if the new course of action is significantly cognitively distant from the status quo, and it is thus more likely to challenge beliefs about what is legitimate in a given context. There is strong evidence that institutional actors such as financial analysts tend to delegitimize courses of action that are especially distant from the cognitive status quo, and firms that meet such resistance tend to shy away from their intent to implement these initiatives. Stated differently, when the pursuit of cognitively distant opportunities is at stake, the average firm fails to persuade external audiences."
Trechos retirados de "Toward a Behavioral Theory of Strategy" de Giovanni Gavetti, publicado por Organization Science - Vol. 23, No. 1, January–February 2012, pp. 267–285
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