اثر پیچیدگی استراتژیک بر استراتژی بازاریابی و عملکرد سازمانی

While researchers have examined many antecedents of marketing strategy, there is scant research assessing the effect of organizational cognition. In this study, organizational cognition is examined in terms of the firm's strategic complexity, which is its capacity to integrate multiple environmental dimensions during marketing strategy making. The results from a sample of wholesale distributors reveal four strategic groups that differ based upon their degree of strategic complexity. Results support the proposition that strategic complexity is an organizational capability that enables more effective strategy making and produces superior firm performance.

Organizational competencies such as innovation, flexibility, and responsiveness result from collective cognition or sensemaking. A sustainable competitive advantage derives from the firm's capacity to successfully assimilate, negotiate, and capitalize on complexities in its environment. Marketing performs a key role in an organization's sensemaking efforts through gathering, disseminating, interpreting, and storing activities that seek to understand and act upon the environment (Sinkula, 1994). In this role, marketing potentially shapes and directs the lens through which the organization perceives its strategic situation, and by extension, the actions taken in response. A fundamental issue for researchers is to understand and explain organizational behavior as pertaining to the deployment of marketing resources for competitive advantage. To address this issue, this study assumes a cognitive perspective by examining an organization's strategic complexity, or ability to simultaneously integrate multiple environmental domains. Organizations can seek to either absorb variety in interpreting their environment by holding multiple and possibly conflicting interpretations or reduce understanding to a single representation (Boisot and Child, 1999). Effective organizational sensemaking requires tapping into multiple domains and synthesizing the demands of each of these domains in response to changes in the environment. Not only must the organization attend to the market (its customers and competitors), but it also must attend to its internal capabilities (such as its value creation and delivery capabilities) and to changes in its macro-environment (such as changes in the social, technological, economic, and legal forces that impact the organization). Strategically complex organizations construe their environment in a multidimensional way, relating each dimension to the achievement of organizational outcomes (Streufert and Swezey, 1986). This study seeks to relate this capability to effective marketing strategy making and superior firm performance.

This paper responds to Walsh's (1995) call for research establishing a relationship between organizational cognition and action and specifically addresses Varadarajan and Jayachandran's (1999) request for research examining the role of organizational cognition and marketing strategy. Studying strategic complexity furthers our understanding of the processes by which organizations seek to make sense of their environment and the firm's role within it. By uncovering this process, we begin to explain how firms develop and deploy resources for creating and sustaining a competitive advantage, thus increasing our understanding of marketing capabilities (Day, 1994). Many questions remain for marketing scholars to explore, and more research needs to be done to clarify marketing's role in improving the organization's sense and response capabilities.