Performance and Autonomy in Organizations: Determining Dominant Environmental Components

Abstract

The formulation of a strategy for an organization begins with identifying the opportunities and risks in the environment. A full and permanent search—or scanning—of all environmental forces is both too costly and intractable in terms of management time. Our findings indicate that managers do not try to identify all environmental forces. Identifying the dominant components of the environment focuses scanning efforts and saves energy and costs. Furthermore, our findings clearly point out that achievement of autonomy may be advanced by organizational performance. An optimal strategy for a manager seeking to increase autonomy would be to concentrate efforts on dominant environmental components. A spillover effect will generalize this autonomy.