Middle Involvement And Strategy Decision-making Effectiveness

Middle managers play an important role in the organization, but in terms of its position and role in the organization, middle managers are in a "sand layer" which is a rather awkward position. Whether we should promote or restrict middle managers involvement in corporate’s strategic activities is still controversial. With the deepening of the strategic process research in recent years, more and more research emphasized the importance of middle managers in the corporate strategy. Around the middle perspective, studies expanded from different directions of the strategic process and many scholars stressed the middle involvement in strategic decision-making. The involvement of middle managers not only reflect the decision-related issues and information to senior managers to improve the integrity of the decision-making information but also conducive to the realization of the cognition consistency between the middle and senior management decision-making. This can make middle managers comtrol the execution of the decision-making better to get good effectiveness of the decision-making. However, the strategic decisions are the responsibility of executives for a long time, basis on the inherent mindset, how executives deal with the middle-level involvement is essential and to achieve middle-level participation is not so easy.In view of the strategic decision-making is a strategy choice process during which the executives need to perceive、scam、 evaluate and process large amounts of information, this article studied the middle involvement in strategic decision-making and the regulatory role of the top executives in the relationship between the two above on the basis of the analysis above and a lot of literatur. Specifically, this article do the work in two areas:First, build a theoretical model of with the middle involvement as the independent variable, the strategic decision-making as the dependent variable and the cognitive style of executives as manipulated variable. Second, on the theoretical basis, use the large sample survey method for data collection and the SPSS17.0pair for data analysis. Eventually come to the following conclusions: First, verify the positive impact of the middle involvement on the effects of strategic decisions through the empirical method, not only makes up for the lack of empirical research, but also means that if we can give full play to the role of the middle managers, enterprises can obtain better decisions.Second, analysis the role played by the executives with the different cognitive style between the mid-level participation and strategic decision-effect relationship. The results show that the creative style has no significant regulatory role in the relationship and analytical style plays a significantly negative regulatory role. This shows that under the leadership of analytical executives, the influence of mid-level participation will be weakened; under the leadership of creative executives, mid-level participation may be able to play its original influence. This means that executives with different cognitive style will show different preferences in the processing of information, which is of great significance for understanding the strategic choices of executives.Third, in the strategic decision-making practice, it’s necessary to pay attention to the match of executives’cognitive style and decision-making tasks and the balance between executives and middle mangagers. Only good match and balance can make full use of the advantages of different cognitive style and coordinate high-mid level relationship, then ultimately to promote the improvement of the strategic decision-making effectiveness.Through the work above, the main contribution of this paper are as follows: First, Break the traditional strategic decision-making mode which is dominated by the executives, emphasize the need for participation of the middle managers with empirical method; Second, starting from the cognitive style, reveal the internal stability difference of individuals in information processon, deepen the understanding of individual differences in behavior; Then, triggering further discussion of the mid-level participation, thinking the mechanism behind the middle involvement in the strategic decision-making, encouragus looking for the factors affecting the participation of the middle managers and examining the middle involvement in other strategic activities; In addition, analysis of different cognitive is helpful for the self-style location of executivesand the understand of self strengths and weaknesses, to understand the impact of every kind of style on the enterprise strategic choice, so pay attention to the self-correcting during the decision-making process, to get better strategic decisions; Finally, we may be able to strengthen the emphasis on middle managers and promote enterprises to encourage middle participate in the strategic process.