Participants’ individual learning during open strategy initiatives: do they learn and is it useful for their occupational role ?

Traditional organizations set up more and more initiatives that aim at opening participation in order to escape bureaucratic silos and to benefit from novel understandings. Among them, open-strategy initiatives consist in asking people from lower-level echelons to come and join strategic conversations in addition to their occupational role. Participants then have to conciliate their new role as strategists and their traditional occupational role, something that they can be reluctant to (Smith et al., 2018; Vaara et al., 2019). To date, past studies in open strategy research have focused on the influence that the competences and knowledge of participants in their occupational role have in their ability to accomplish their new role as strategist. The core assumption of open strategy research is that lower-echelons participants develop in their occupational role knowledge that is valuable for strategic purposes and that their inclusion in open strategy initiatives provides better insights and creativity about strategic issues (Hautz et al., 2017; Whittington et al., 2011). Open strategy initiatives are therefore created in order for lower-echelon participants to communicate, work on their knowledge and pass it to upper echelons. And because many empirical studies document how lower-echelons participants fail to link their knowledge to strategic issues (Splitter et al., 2021; Stieger et al., 2012), research has focused on how to develop their discursive and strategic competencies (Luedicke et al., 2017; Hautz et al., 2017) or on how different open strategy initiatives infrastructures (Brielmaier & Friesl, 2021) help them fulfilling their new strategist role more effectively. However, we know little on the "reverse" way: how do the knowledge and competencies lower-echelons participants develop in their new role as strategist affect the ways in which they fulfill their occupational role? Yet, this question is important for different reasons. First, if participants do not learn knowledge or competence that they can transfer into their occupational role, they may see their participation as useless and just another work overload (Brielmaier & Friesl, 2021; Dobusch & Kapeller, 2018; Luedicke et al., 2017). Second, the learning that takes place during their participation can enforce a dual identity – as strategist and as occupational member - that is difficult to articulate, generating anxiety and other negative emotional feelings (Bresnen et al., 2019;). Third, recent research has shown that openness in a spatially and temporally bounded process can covertly propagate toward occupational roles so that the organization as whole progresses towards more openness (Stjerne et al., 2023). To answer our research question, we organize our paper as follow: in the next section, we explain how involving lower-level participants in open strategy initiatives mean asking them to develop a new role of strategist and put it high in their hierarchy of roles. We explore role theory research to highlight that such a move is difficult and that we need to advance our knowledge about what benefits participants may retire from developing a strategist role in addition to their occupational roles. We assume that those benefits are linked with learning that helps enriching occupational roles rather than with symbolic rewards. We then explain how we collect and analyze data from two open-strategy initiatives at the French National Railroad Company in order to document the learning that takes place during those initiatives and its consequences at the operational level. In the results sections, we present empirical evidence for the different types of knowledge that participants were able to develop and use in their occupational roles. We then discuss how their learning initiated two types of evolutions in their occupational role (job crafting and job shaping). We also examine the consequences of their learning for open strategy processes and organization. Eventually, our study contributes to the open strategy literature by evidencing what participants learn during their participation and how their learning affects their occupational role. It also suggests novel arguments to promote participation at the lower-level echelons.