Strategic Planning in an Accounting Department using Causal Maps and Cognitive Factions

Abstract

Strategic planning can be a time-consuming task for academic departments. As such, an effective and efficient strategic planning approach is paramount. This paper presents a strategic planning approach using causal mapping to uncover the factors which faculty members believed would make their department (in the USA) more successful. The information gathered during the session was used as part of an AACSB accounting maintenance of accreditation process. The approach applied here elicits faculty involvement in ways which bring to the surface perspectives held by subgroups/factions of faculty. Additional perspectives are positive in a strategic planning context as they can contribute to devising strategies that might not have resulted by considering only majority views. Content analysis of the strategic plan suggests the range of views uncovered were integrated into the plan, including both the strategic factors and the relative importance of the factors.

Keywords:

• Strategic planning
• AACSB accounting accreditation
• causal maps
• cognitive factions

Notes

The terms cognitive maps, causal maps, and cause maps have been used by different authors to mean the same thing. As such, for readability purposes, we will use the term causal maps in the remainder of the paper.

The web-based Group Cognitive Mapping System (GCMS) is written in Java and it uses a Microsoft Access database. It has been used to conduct over 200 group sessions and is available free from the authors on request.

The authors should like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out these additional reasons.

Interested readers should refer to Bougon (1983) and Sheetz et al. (1994) for a the underlying arguments for the framing question approach and, in this case, Tegarden et al. (2009) for a specific example related to the current study.

Even though the software used in this study supports this step in an anonymous manner, for expediency purposes, this step was performed manually.

For a complete description of Ward's algorithm see Romesburg, 2004, pp. 129–135.

The authors should like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.