A Briefing Note for Strategic Management - Essay Example

What this study found was that firms in the restaurant industry varied in their responses to such outside pressure depending on their levels of susceptibility or vulnerabilities based on multi-theoretic models. The findings provide an important lesson for strategic management on how to respond to such external pressures for organizational change.  Special interest groups (SIG) are not entirely new but they are becoming more activist in their demands to get what they want. Companies cannot avoid their influence as they are forced to respond in order to preserve legitimacy, goodwill and public image.

The first theory is an institutional perspective in which business firms are pressed to conform to certain norms depending on their degree of visibility. The next, resource-dependence theory, organizations can be particularly vulnerable to pressure if they are dependent on vital external inputs and are therefore more likely to make certain accommodations or concessions to outside demands as they are afraid of disruptions in resource or input inflows. The third resource-based theory looks at the firm's internal capabilities in how it can predictably respond to such outside pressures.

Those firms with dynamic capabilities are better able to resist such pressure as they can efficiently and quickly alter their ways of competing through innovative skills. The flexibility allows them more rapid responses. The last theory is organizational cognition in which firms are considered interpretive systems based on their top managers' sense of urgency and manageability.