By applying formalized innovation portfolio management systems, firms
seek to ensure an alignment of their goals and strategy with their
employees' different abilities, actions, and outcomes. However, research
indicates that nonrational, political behavior also determines
formalized innovation portfolio management decision-making processes.
Research on political behavior in respect of innovation portfolio
management usually conceptualizes political behavior as a set of
self-serving activities, such as negotiation, bargaining, coalition
building, and acquiring power, aimed at protecting, maintaining, or
promoting an actor's self-interest and power. Consequently, extant
research tends to focus on political behavior's dysfunctional impacts on
decision-making processes and their subsequent outcomes. This paper
challenges this negativity bias by exploring a novel, neutral
specification of political behavior and its relation to innovation
portfolio management decision-making processes. By conducting an
automotive industry case study focusing on the innovation portfolio
management decision-making processes, the paper analyzed the data from
43 interviewees. The conceptual model shows that managers' political
capabilities determine their ability to behave politically. According to
the results, political behavior comprises the activities that prepare
the stage and orchestrate others in order to form a political coalition.
Furthermore, results show that political behavior functions as a
sensegiving and a sensebreaking process, with managers seeking to shape
an innovation project's understanding according to their interests and
to influence portfolio decisions. The resulting novel specification of
political behavior extends the construct's scope and validity by
investigating their functional and dysfunctional aspects, and by
indicating that a political sensemaking process complements formalized
innovation portfolio management decision-making processes.