Reconsidering the Strategic Implications of Decision Comprehensiveness

Abstract

A key question in strategy is whether comprehensiveness enables firms to make better strategic decisions in various environments. I identify two problems hindering efforts to answer this question: past studies have generally theorized about a different dependent variable than they have measured, and they have conflated the concepts of uncertainty, ambiguity, and instability in accounting for environmental moderation. I then reframe the question and propose ways of characterizing organizational information environments so researchers can identify more precisely those real-world contexts across which the value of comprehensiveness varies.