Strategic ambiguity: a systematic review, a typology and a dynamic capability view
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose While strategic ambiguity has increasingly been used as a communication practice in response to crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and global conflicts, its proactive role in shaping organizations remains underexamined. Moreover, a comprehensive investigation into its antecedents, moderators, mechanisms, and outcomes – aligned with specific strategic ambiguity aims – is still lacking. We investigate how organizations deploy strategic ambiguity to shape their environment and identify the factors that affect the effectiveness of strategic ambiguity in achieving diverse strategic aims. Design/methodology/approach We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 22 empirical studies on strategic ambiguity in organizational communication. We analyzed articles using the Gioia method to identify its key components – antecedents, mechanisms, moderators, and outcomes – based on the pursued aim. Findings We reframe strategic ambiguity as a dynamic capability and, building on this, we introduce a novel typology of strategic ambiguity based on two key dimensions: organizational flexibility (centralized vs decentralized) and environmental responsiveness (proactive vs reactive). Four distinct aims of strategic ambiguity, each with specific antecedents, mechanisms, moderators, and outcomes, emerge: (1) collaboration and engagement, (2) flexibility and adaptability, (3) control and influence and (4) reputation and legal protection. Originality/value We reframe the understanding of strategic ambiguity by positioning it as a dynamic capability rather than merely a strategic communication practice. By introducing a typology that outlines antecedents, mechanisms, moderators, and outcomes for each specific aim, we offer a structured framework for comprehensively understanding and leveraging strategic ambiguity.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it