Bringing managers and management back into strategy: Interfaces and dynamic managerial capabilities

Abstract

While managers were central to the founding contributions to strategic management, much later strategy thinking minimized the role of managers. We call for moving beyond perspectives that either conflate managers with the firm itself or treat managers as isolated entities. Recent developments such as microfoundations, strategic human capital, and behavioral strategy have gone some way toward making room for managers. However, we argue that more needs to be done, and drawing on recent research sketch a nuanced approach that centers on the dynamic social interactions between managers, at different levels, and other key actors within the organization. We build on the concept of interfaces to elucidate and introduce mechanisms that capture social influence at the interface and implications for proximate and distal organization-level outcomes and link this concept to the notion of dynamic managerial capabilities to add microfoundational insight to the explanation of competitive advantage.