Michael's research interests focus on 'Behavioural Strategy', which examines how cognition, emotions and social behaviour affect strategy in practice and the difficulties of execution.
Three Areas in Focus
top management team
The strategy process typically involves the top management team. Their cognitive and mental schema influence strategic choices, decisions, and organizational outcomes. The central contribution in this stream of work by Michael is the idea of TMT’s implicit “emotional routines”, defined as patterns of interactions that are systematically influenced by tacit affective experiences which unwittingly support or hinder the TMT’s role in the strategy process. Michael’s work provides a novel examination and contribution to understanding Top Management Team fragmentation by including the role of emotions.
Change management
Michael examines the managerial and organizational processes, defined as "the way things are done in the firm, or what we might refer to as its 'routines', or patterns of current practice and learning", that facilitate action and strategy implementation within a firm. By identifying and operationalizing embedded organizational practices and their relationship with organizational change, he explained some of the reasons why change fails (or succeeds). He defined this ability to change and successfully execute the strategy as "Changeability".
systems psychodynamics
Michael’s research contributes to refining the role of implicit emotions by drawing upon a systems psychodynamic approach. This includes two aspects of organizational life: the organization's primary task, its division of labour, its boundaries and organizational environment as well as the experience of sentient relationships between the people that work in organizations from a psychoanalytic perspective. The latter refers to the individual, group, and organizational conscious, unconscious and social processes which are a source of unresolved or unrecognized difficulties.
learn more about michael’s research
Most executives struggle with the challenge of executing strategic organizational change with reported failure rates of over 60%. The broad question is: why does this problem of strategy execution persist? Michael's research explores how organizations’ strategies get executed in response to environmental shifts and, equally important, how do the people within them react.
His work falls within the broad domain of behavioral strategy, which aims to bring realistic assumptions about human cognition, emotions and social behavior to the strategic management of organizations and, thereby enrich strategy theory, empirical research, and real-world practice". Specifically, he focuses on the behavioral side of the strategy process (e.g. strategic choice, decisions, and execution), the hidden and psychological foundations of collective actions, and the outcomes of organizational change.
In particular, he has extended the approach to Behavioral Strategy in two ways. On the foundations of social dynamics, he draws upon on interaction theories, where there is an established approach that studies face-to-face interactions and their relationship to larger patterns of social organization. These interactions become the unplanned practices that 'structure' organizational outcomes. His second extension of Behavioral Strategy contributes to its psychological foundations. It draws upon a systems psychodynamics perspective, which explores the role of implicit and unconscious emotions and thoughts that unwittingly influence executive behaviors. Incorporating these hidden, unrecognized or implicit routines into the models of organizational studies and making them explicit, Michael’s research enriched our understanding of previously ignored or misunderstood interactions or interactions that have led to mistaken interventions during organizational change. The leadership's inability to recognize group-level emotions was a factor that contributed to the company's downfall. Together, in drawing upon these additional theoretical approaches, he takes the view that institutions are sustained, altered, and extinguished as they are enacted by collections of individuals in everyday situations.