Debiasing the Literature on Executive Decision-Making Biases

In the field of management, scholars from various communities of practice, including strategy, organizational behavior, business ethics, entrepreneurship, organization theory, and international business, have drawn on the cognitive psychology and behavioral decision research to explore how the cognitive biases of executives impact their strategic decision-making. While this proliferation of research highlights the importance of executive biases, it has also created a highly fragmented body of knowledge. We synthesize this diverse and fragmented research into an integrative framework on executive biases. This framework connects the negative and positive aspects of executives’ reliance on heuristics, and also classifies various types of biases and the benefits of heuristic decision-making. It further connects executive biases to strategic decision-making processes and outcomes while also highlighting links to executives’ roles and characteristics, the contextual environment, and potential debiasing approaches. A general insight from our review is that scholars may themselves have exhibited bias in the study of executive biases by focusing on executive biases and strategic decisions that are convenient to study and using the theoretical and empirical approaches commonly applied within their specific communities. To systematically address this scholarly convenience bias, we employ our integrative framework to develop a novel research agenda on executive biases.