Investigating the Impact of Need Knowledge on Strategy Development in Organizations

Strategy development results from a knowledge-creating process to guide organizational behavior and achieve (long-term) goals. However, a strategy rarely considers the needs of the organization and its members explicitly. If known and considered, needs might have an existential impact on behavior. Therefore, we propose that a profound strategy should take into account needs. Arguably, the generation of any strategy can be considered as an organizational learning process, which is shaped by and results in knowledge. Therefore, a knowledge perspective might be helpful to study what impact the consideration of needs has on the outcome of a strategy development process. Since the concept of need knowledge has only been introduced recently to knowledge-based management, the impact of this type of knowledge has not been considered in strategy development processes. Our empirical research aims at understanding the differences between strategies, which emerge with regards to needs in the social system and strategies, which are developed without explicitly considering needs. Therefore, we conducted an experiment with two groups of students, who were encouraged in a collaborative learning task to design strategies for a better learning and teaching environment at their university. To evaluate these strategies, we used a repertory grid analysis to investigate how explicit need knowledge affects the outcome of the organizational learning process.