Title
Sticky Aspirations: Organizational Time Perspective and Competitiveness
Abstract
Managers evaluate the organizational performance by comparing it with historical aspiration levels, and are more likely to make strategic changes when the performance falls below the aspiration level. Historical aspiration levels can be updated with different speed, because a focus on current performance will lead to quickly adjusting aspiration levels where historical performance has low weight, while a focus on past performance will lead to slowly adjusting performance levels where the current performance has low weight. A simulation model of aspiration-level learning and strategic change under uncertainty yields the following findings: (1) Slow adjustments of an aspiration level gives higher performance across different levels of environmental uncertainty, (2) slow adjustments of aspirations will dominate in populations with different adjustment levels if low-performing organizations are removed and replaced by organizations of the form currently performing best, and (3) stronger selection leads to faster domination by slow adjusters. Empirical analysis of format changes in radio stations finds slow adjustment of aspiration levels to be prevalent, and finds slower adjustment in competitive markets, as predicted.
Year
DOI
Venue
2002
10.1287/orsc.13.1.1.540
Organization Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
historical aspiration level,organizational time perspective,past performance,higher performance,organizational performance,sticky aspirations,historical performance,performance level,slow adjustment,aspiration level,low weight,current performance,competitive advantage,performance
Organizational performance,Strategic change,Competitive advantage,Knowledge management,Industrial organization,Operations management,Business
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
13
1
1047-7039
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
2.90
0
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Henrich R. Greve19412.06