Scanning business environments: an investigation into managerial scanning behaviour

This research sought to obtain a detailed understanding of the scanning behaviour of senior managers. Prior literature that substantially informed this research was drawn from three areas: environmental scanning, competitive strategy, and to a lesser extent, managerial cognition. The purpose of this research was to 1) provide an updated indepth understanding of the phenomenon of scanning behaviour, 2) to attempt to identify what influences scanning behaviour at an individual level, 3) to assess the collective state of management researchers’ knowledge of scanning through contrasting the findings of this research with all major prior scanning studies, and 4) to consider the implications for organisations on how to more effectively scan both the task and remote environments. The research approach included conducting in depth qualitative pilot studies and analysing data from an extensive survey completed by 394 senior managers. The major findings were that scanning behaviour appears to be an embedded routine that is not obviously strongly related to job specific, individual experiential, or organisational contextual variables; that significant components of scanning behaviour such as formality of approach, degree of use of personal resources, and breadth of scanning coverage were identified that help to discern differences in individual scanning behaviour; and that the inconclusive results of prior scanning studies indicate that a change in research direction is needed to focus on a different set of influencing variables. Major managerial implications included the need to understand biases in managerial scanning behaviour; to work with and not against managerial scanning behavioural biases; to support a mix of scanning behaviours in an organisation; to deliberately allocate scanning resources to cover environmental sectors; to selectively use managers external to the organisation; to utilise a variety of different sources; and to align scanning activities with organisational strategy processes. Limitations of this research are mostly methodological concerning survey bias skewed to UK managers and the extent that espoused responses differ from actual behaviour. Future research opportunities include testing an alternative set of influencing variables such as personality characteristics and learning styles; analysing the interaction of the scanning components identified to strategy processes; and researching scanning from an organisational perspective.