Three weeks ago I posed a question: How do organizations really create new routines and capabilities? "Dynamic capabilities" allow organizations to develop new routines and capabilities to adapt to their competitive environment, whereas "satisficing" is a form of decision making under limited constraints that satisfies some desired goal, however imperfectly or sub-optimally. I gave current and former students the formal definitions of each concept and asked them to indicate by survey which concept they thought was appealing, interesting, and a more realistic depiction of what takes place in organizations. Here are the results.
"This concept is appealing to me" received much higher agreement with respondents for dynamic capabilities than satisficing.
Competing conclusions? (1) The satisficing literature failed to satisfy the explanatory requirements test for how organizations develop, recombine, and refine their routines and capabilities. (2) "Dynamic capabilities" sounds sexier than "satisficing." (3) The decision-making component in satisficing is important for "what really happens in organizations," but is less interesting or appealing than the theory that seemingly ignores managerial decision making. What do you think?
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