Gut Feelings and Group Dynamics: Intuition in Strategic Decision-Making

The role of intuition in strategic decision-making (SDM) presents a puzzle. While widely recognized as an individual-level cognitive process that helps Top Management Teams (TMTs) navigate complexity, the literature reveals mixed findings, showing positive, negative, and nonsignificant effects. This inconsistency arises from a critical oversight: strategic decisions are typically made by teams, not individuals. Existing research largely neglects the mediating and moderating team social processes that translate individual intuitive inputs into team-based decisions. This paper therefore addresses the question: how does an individual cognitive process contribute to a team-based decision-making process? Drawing on an upper echelons contingency perspective, we explore the relationship between intuition and comprehensiveness, a core SDM process linked to firm performance. We theorize that TMT members’ intuitive judgments contribute to comprehensive decision-making, especially when TMTs are cognitively diverse and are socio-behaviorally integrated. We test our theory using a multi-respondent, multi-source sample of 117 strategic decisions. Our findings reveal a surprising dynamic. While cognitive diversity facilitates the integration of intuitive inputs into comprehensive decision-making, socio-behavioral integration has the opposite effect. These results offer new insights into the role of social and cognitive processes in SDM, advancing understanding of intuition’s role in team-based contexts.