The Organizational Foundations of Behavioral Strategy

Behavioral strategy aspires to build theories that are behaviorally plausible. However, the diversity of human behaviors can make it challenging to know what behavioral assumptions to use when building theories about organizations and their strategies. Fortunately, organizational contexts are, to varying degrees, designed. This introduces a powerful set of levers – sorting, framing, and structuring – that reduce this diversity of behavioral possibilities to a tractable yet plausible few. Attention to the organizational contexts that shape individual and group behavior can, therefore, help behavioral strategists attain their objectives of building theories with sound behavioral foundations.