How top managers make sense of their role in the strategic decision-making process: an investigation into the Portuguese textile industry

The literature relating to strategy is full of contradictions. Top managers are expected to be tough-minded but flexible, to have tight controls on some areas and loose controls on others, to have an inspiring broad vision along meticulous attention to detail, to have a linear sense of rationality but to thrive on chaos. It is therefore our intention to find out how top managers make sense of these contradictions, how they integrate these contradictions in their experience and their management. This is because top managers live very fragmented lives. Although strategic decision making has long been a topic of great interest in the field of strategic management, most of the studies have not addressed the cognitive dimension of decision making, namely the question of how decision makers actually think. Strategy is a work of fiction and therefore all strategists are authors of fiction and the question is how top managers understand this fiction, their role and how they see themselves in this fiction. This paper will address these and similar questions and will try to find answers to them based on an analytical approach. The study took place in the context of the clothing and textile industries in Portugal and the companies targeted in this study are of medium and large sizes. © Common Ground, Hafez Abdo, Manuel Aguiar, All Rights Reserved.