Executive evaluative ambivalence: A more balanced look

Executive evaluative ambivalence influences how firms act and respond to strategic issues but research on what is associated with such ambivalence has languished. Prior research focused on perspective complexity to the relative neglect of diagnostic effort, leaving imbalanced our understanding of not only executive evaluative ambivalence, but also issue diagnosis and sensemaking in general. Considering factors relating to both the subject of diagnosis (executives) and the object of diagnosis (the strategic issue), we test our hypotheses with pre-existing data addressing how executives evaluated a period of economic environmental equivocality. We find that executive job demands and perceived issue time pressure exhibited inverted-U relationships, and that a higher proportion of external executives and a narrower target market focus exhibited positive relationships, with executive evaluative ambivalence. We also confirm and extend previous perspective complexity research and close by addressing implications for research and practice. JEL Classification: M10, M12, M19