Contemporary Shifts in Managerial Strategic Behavior

Answer

Contemporary Shifts in Managerial Strategic Behavior

            Dramatic economic and business events witnessed in the past are changing ways in which firms currently behave. Currently, the noticeable changes are witnessed in the managerial and competitive behaviors where traditional patterns have paved way to alternative, systematic approaches.  Some of these behaviors are compelling firms to become dominant by attaining complete competitive advantages in competencies and capital. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to escribe shifts in the managerial strategic behavior in the contemporary society across the world.

            External collaboration in research and development is one of the managerial strategic behaviors that firms currently experience across the globe. In the past, managerial strategic behavior encompassed partnering with internal stakeholders to gain the necessary knowledge and skills need for proper execution of tasks. This trend has changed as most managers across the world collaborate externally in research and development to produce quality products. Dagnino, Di Guardo and Padula (2012) posited that in the contemporary society, research and development managers collaborate to acquire newly emerging scientific knowledge or technologies once they have established that an emerging technology is likely to help them but they lack the needed internal experts to progress on their own. Intuitively, from a strategic management perspective, external collaboration has offered accessibility to new skills, technologies and knowledge. Moreover, it has entailed a high ambiguity of operations and volatile outcome. Principally, the research and development collaboration has become a critical issue in the managerial strategic behavior that requires an exceptional managerial cognition that achieves higher unfamiliarity, uncertainty and frequent change.

            Openness to new technology is a change in the managerial strategic behavior that different firms across the world currently witness. Intuitively, new technology is beneficial to various industries such as biopharmaceutical industry. This, according to El Namaki (2013), has become apparent in the 18^th century when new biotechnology firms that were focusing on molecular biology gained entry into the industry. This transformed the industrial dominant logic, since the dominant companies during that time majorly depended on chemistry as a technical knowledge in developing new drugs. Accordingly, for companies to remain competitive, almost all pharmaceutical research and developments had to expand their competencies in molecular biology to remain competitive and manufacture new drugs, thereby forming a completely new shape in the industry evolution. Therefore, managerial reception to new technology is critical since research and development managers must assess and decide on the effects of embracing emerging technologies. Although most research and development managers are vastly involved in making critical decisions on whether to adopt new technologies or not, there is no study that has examined the connection between managerial openness to new innovation and technology. As such, the openness to new technology by research and development managers is an essential R&D managerial reasoning that intensely understands the potentials and values of new technology and consequently embracing them.

            Openness to networking is change to managerial strategic behavior that firms across the world currently experience. Kim (2015) posited that past studies on networking have failed to offer strong empirical findings on the direct link to innovation. Nonetheless, current studies have reported that innovation is affected by formal networking, precisely open innovation policy, innovation locus process, as well as, number of external knowledge sources. Regarding networking and cognition, Özleblebici and Çetin (2015) formed a network analysis that become a major patter for evaluating the connection between social and cognitive processes at the managerial level. Currently, most managers, especially in the pharmaceutical industries are embracing the benefits of networking. Through formal networking, these managers are currently involved in the pursuit of new scientific technologies and knowledge to help them produce more complex and important products.

             Openness to information sharing is a change in the managerial strategic behavior witnessed by international companies. In the past, most strategic managers believed that keeping critical information to themselves would make them competitive and climb to managerial positions faster. However, there has been unprecedented change in this strategic behavior as most managers currently embrace online communication since they believe that such process accommodate innovation by providing research and development managers with the opportunity to  obtain, translate, and convey external information (Ray, 2004).  Currently, in most organizations, strategic management encompasses adopting online communication systems to provide strategic managers with multi-level transfers of skills and knowledge. Essentially, the openness to online information sharing has contributed to collaboration and innovation across companies. Similarly, seeking concentration is major shift managerial strategic behavior. Most players across various industries have embarked on mergers and acquisitions to reduce the number of competitors to a given market and bar other players who intend to enter the market.

            In conclusion, dramatic economic and business event of the past have continued to cause far reaching changes to the competitive and strategic behaviors of firms across the world. As already discussed, predictable patterns are paving way to non-conventional approaches. A critical evaluation of managerial strategic behavior of various companies indicated a critical change towards systematic and managerial strategic behavior. Intuitively, these behaviors depict in openness to information sharing, openness to networking, openness to networking, as well as, external collaboration.