Going with the Gut : Exploring Top Management Team Intuition in Strategic Decision-Making

Intuition plays a vital role in strategic decision-making, enabling executives to cut through complexity and to navigate the information processing challenges posed by dynamic environments. However, enduring questions remain concerning the antecedents and the effectiveness of intuitive strategic decision-making. Accordingly, we used critical incident technique and conducted in-depth interviews with top managers from 27 UK firms, focusing on recent intuitive ‘hits’ and ‘misses’. We explore these recent strategic decision episodes to provide an in-depth and nuanced understanding of intuition in strategic decision-making, contributing to the literature in two important ways. First, we build theory concerning the contextual triggers that foster the use of intuition, and second, we derive insights into the contextual factors that render intuition more, as well as less effective. We offer a series of theoretical and practical insights whereby intuition can be leveraged as a vital input to the strategic decision-making process.