Dissertation
A hermeneutic phenomenological study: experiences of senior executives decision making on transformational initiatives in a Fortune 100 company
Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Drexel University
Feb 2021
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00000354
Abstract
Business decision making becomes more complex when focused on strategic corporate transformational initiatives. Although the existing scholarly research was important, it lacked the deep exploration into decision-making experiences, especially of corporate senior leaders making decisions on transformational initiatives. Various studies conducted showed decision making related to transformational initiatives has had a negative impact on corporate performance improvement. This study explored what meanings senior executives managing transformational initiatives ascribed to their experience of decision making, especially as it related to impacting corporate performance improvement. This hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used to understand the phenomenon of decision making and provided the opportunity to guide corporate leaders and senior sponsors to interact in ways that may differ from executives who lack the knowledge of this lived experience. Identification of insights across the seven leaders studied provided understanding of individual perspectives, and new insights across, leading the researcher to discover the essence of humanistic leaderness. Through the humanistic leaderness of those interviewed various feelings were described, some that the leaders believed led to failures of transformations and/or did not meet predicted results on performance improvement. They attributed such failures to lack of senior sponsorship support, overly aggressive decisions on targets, inability to use forward focused assumptions, lack of understanding of each employees' contributions, and over estimation of labor arbitrage compared to internal capability loss. The researcher concluded from this study that using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to surface transformation leaders' voices could prove to reduce transformation failures. These intersubjective shared meanings on their lived experiences of decision making would enable leaders and their senior sponsors to form a new social reality, one where new insight would improve corporate performance for future transformational initiatives. Based on the leader's experiences, the researcher developed multiple recommendations and opportunities for future research that could augment the results of this study to further explore her conclusions beyond this limited population.
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Details
- Title
- A hermeneutic phenomenological study
- Creators
- Sherry A. Maklary
- Contributors
- Joy C. Phillips (Advisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Number of pages
- xv, 217 pages
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- School of Education (1997-2026); Drexel University
- Other Identifier
- 991014961448904721