Information Flow and Strategic Consensus in Organizations

This study investigate strategic consensus in organizations. Previous studies have examined consensus in the top management team and between the top management team and middle managers. In our study we propose the importance of considering consensus among lower level employees. We argue that intra-organizational flow of information influences the development of consensus at the middle and lower levels of the organizational hierarchy. We also argue that the hierarchical level of the information source plays a crucial role in developing consensus. We analyze these relationships with data collected from a large service organization over two time periods.