No Team is an Island: An Integrative View of Strategic Consensus between Groups

Groups – teams, work groups, departments – are the building blocks of organizations, but ‘no team is an island’. Groups need to coordinate and align their strategic efforts for the organization at large to perform. To better understand how groups can integrate their strategic efforts to operate as parts of a bigger whole, this dissertation investigates the crucial yet under-researched topic of strategic consensus between groups. If groups have strategic consensus, shared understanding of the strategy, they are more likely to coordinate and integrate more effectively and better perform their collaborative tasks. The four studies composing this dissertation (1) propose a new method to measure, visualize and aggregate individual cognition to group- and between group-level with a more comprehensive, integrative conceptualization of the multiple dimensions of consensus; (2) demonstrate that the group with the strongest group identification and the group with the lowest organizational identification in an organizational dyad respectively limit and foster achieving a high degree of strategic consensus between groups; (3) show that in a dyad the centrality of each group is a determining factor for the degree of consensus between the groups and the most central individuals are an important driver for strategic alignment between groups; (4) indicate that strategic consensus between groups and boundary spanning behavior are requisites for intergroup cooperation, and the effect of strategic consensus between groups on intergroup cooperation is moderated by the degree to which groups display boundary spanning behavior. Together these findings extend strategic management along behavioral lines, offering an integrative view of strategic consensus between groups.

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