Performance Feedback and Middle Managers’ Divergent Strategic Behavior

When do middle managers nurture new strategic initiatives to facilitate organizational adaptability and champion them to the top management team? These behaviors--coined divergent strategic behavior--are essential for organizational renewal. Previous research has taken a structural perspective and identified managers’ network, boundary-spanning and hierarchical positions as drivers of divergent strategic behavior. Because strategic behavior is largely voluntary, we examine the heretofore neglected behavioral drivers, and propose organizational- and individual-level performance feedback to explain middle managers’ divergent strategic behavior. Data from 123 senior middle managers governing 21 multi-country organizations (MCOs) of a Fortune 500 company provided empirical support on the role of performance feedback in divergent strategic behavior. Thereby, we contribute to strategy process research by going beyond the existing structural explanations and propose managers’ performance aspirations driving their strategic behavior, and to the behavioral theory of the firm and self-regulation theories by providing a multilevel perspective toward performance feedback.