Individual Heterogeneity and Collective Behavior Formation: Theory, Experiments, and Implications for Human Resource Management

While extant literature has focused on the role of strategic planning, less is known about the role of strategy implementation. Strategy implementation entails developing strategic plans and goals, communicating them to middle managers and employees of the firm, who adapt their working behaviors, which then accumulate to collective performance. From this perspective, strategy implementation resembles a process of collective behavior formation. Managing such processes successfully thus depends on solving the dilemmas involved with collective behaviors. The first study of this dissertation draws on the threshold theory of collective behavior to specify the nature of strategy implementation and explore the role of human resource practices to foster collective behavior formation. The second study uses experimental methodologies to find out whether individual differences (e.g., personality traits, social value orientations) are related to the individual participation in the implementation of a collective strategy. The third study investigates how managerial coordination devices (e.g., goal difficulty, information sharing) impact the collective implementation success.