Integrating intuition and rationality in the strategic decision-making process: Evidence from MNCs

Abstract

The increasing complexity of business contexts, alongside the need for organizations to improve their capabilities and remain competitive on the market, make understanding strategic decision-making processes cornerstone for contemporary organizations. By gaining insights from top- and middle-level managers working in MNCs’ subsidiaries operating in the food industry in the Netherlands, we frame an integrative view on intuition and rationality in the strategic decision-making process and disentangle its antecedents and consequences. The antecedents mainly pertain to those influencing conditions causing tensions when intuition and rationality need to be integrated, namely managers’ personality characteristics, cognitive styles, experience, as well as the environmental forces, insufficient organizational resources, and the relevance of the strategic decision. The consequences assess the perceived effectiveness of the intuition-rationality integration and focus on time efficiency, creativity, and power of persuasion. Such results shed light on what is the role of intuition in the strategic decision-making process, suggesting that integrating it with rationality is in fact not straightforward and can only happen in a bi-directional sequential fashion through a certain degree of managerial decisional elasticity.