The literature presents us with two distinct, and at times opposed, approaches to strategic management: the use of strategic choice and determinism.
This research shows that these approaches can actually be considered as two distinct variables, which create a space or framework in which it is possible to identify, according to the available different amounts of strategic choice and determinism, the four different ontological perspectives of determinism, hard incompatibilism, libertarianism and compatibilism.
According to the literature, within each ontological perspective of the strategic choice/determinism framework, companies use different levels of strategic choice and determinism to produce organizational outcomes.
This research provides empirical evidence of the real life existence of these ontological perspectives, in which companies’ performance of revenues is driven by a different amount of strategic choice or determinism according to the perspectives in which companies operate. This research also shows that other important performance indicators, such as EBITDA, depend only on deterministic variables, while ROA depends neither on strategic choice nor on deterministic variables.
These findings suggest that future research could increase our knowledge on the internal environment of companies, as it could do from the hard incompatibilist perspective, which was not possible to study thoroughly within this research.
The research conclusions provide several contributions to both academic knowledge and practice