Strategic Consensus Mapping: A New Method for Testing and Visualizing Strategic Consensus Within and Between Teams

Research on strategic consensus focuses primarily on the degree of agreement within in a team regarding organizational strategy and does not include other important elements, such as the content of the agreement, between-group consensus, or tests of the significance of differences in consensus (e.g., for evaluating effectiveness of strategic interventions). We propose a new analytical approach, Strategic Consensus Mapping, which provides a comprehensive analysis of strategic consensus within and between groups and includes intuitive and easy-to-grasp visualizations. This approach equips researchers with the necessary tools for integrative theory building in strategic consensus as well as in the broader managerial and organizational cognition domain. We illustrate the use of the proposed methods for a multidimensional, multilevel, and longitudinal analysis with a case example.