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Adopting a dual processing cognitive perspective, this study explores the decision-making processes past the start-up stage that small entrepreneurial businesses employ to grow. The author examines how entrepreneurs evaluate and make decisions on growth opportunities in their business environment. The author uses cognitive style as a theoretical lens to capture differences in information processing, combining interviews and psychometric questionnaires to analyse cognitive styles. The longitudinal mixed methods approach illustrates the richness of the entrepreneur’s decision-making process, which the author tracks over a two-year period. The author determines how intuitive and analytical cognitive styles are used by entrepreneurs and the contribution these styles make to decision-making. The findings show that the two cognitive styles are versatile as entrepreneurs adjust and adapt their cognitive style over time, in keeping with the situational factors of their business environment. The author also finds marked differences between novice and mature entrepreneurs and that experienced entrepreneurs exhibited greater levels of cognitive versatility, which was directly linked to their prior experience. The study has significant implications for future research, which should consider the question how an entrepreneur’s cognitive style is dependent on the business context and their prior experience.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on the naturalistic decision making and cognitive science literature to examine how experienced crisis managers utilize the intuitive and analytical strategies when managing complex incidents. A cognitive model that describes the interplay between strategies is presented and discussed, and the specific role that intuition plays in analytical decision making is addressed.

Designed as a conceptual paper, the extant literature is reviewed to advance discussions on the theme of intuitive and analytical decision making in the naturalistic environment. A new model of expert intuition – the information filtering and intuitive decision model – is presented and evaluated against existing cognitive models from the wider literature.

The paper suggests that experts’ ability to make intuitive decisions is strongly hinged on their information processing skills that allow irrelevant cues to be sifted out while the relevant cues are retained. The paper further revealed that experts generally employ the intuitive mode as their default strategy, drawing on the analytical mode only as conditions warrant.

Prior research has shown that experts often make important task decisions using intuitive or analytical strategies or by combining both, but the sequence these should typically follow is still unresolved. Findings from the intuition model reveal that although intuition often precedes analytical thinking in almost all cases, both strategies exist to offer significant values to decision makers if the basis of their application is well understood.

This paper aims to explore not only the utilitarian but also the hedonic persuasive effects of promotional techniques like 99-ending prices and the influence of consumers’ decision style when evaluating these appeals. Evidence suggests that retailers use 99-ending prices as a promotional technique, based mostly on its savings appeal.

Three complementary studies were performed. A first field study among 317 shoppers allows to test the hypotheses for two groups of decision-makers (intuitive and analytical) using structural equation modeling based on the partial least squares algorithm. Then, a laboratory experiment assigned to 123 respondents manipulates the decision-making style and, in turn, tests more precisely the proposed hypotheses. Finally, the third study replicates the laboratory experiment with 104 respondents without manipulating decision-making; rather it is measured, which allows to test the effect of internal-based versus contextual-based decision style.

First, the 99-ends are not strictly associated to utilitarian benefits (savings, quality or convenience) but also to hedonic benefits fulfilling consumer’s needs for exploration, value expression and entertainment. Second, a better understanding of the moderating role of the decision-making style is obtained: consumers in an intuitive decision mode give importance only to hedonic benefits; and there are differences in the analytical decision mode: when the decision-making style is internal (measured as a personal trait), consumers give importance to both utilitarian and hedonic benefits; however, when the decision-making style is contextual (manipulated), consumers focus only on utilitarian benefits.

It is necessary to check the robustness of the results depending on other marketing variables (e.g. product category knowledge, purchase frequency) and individual consumers’ differences in price-sensitivity (e.g. price consciousness).

The findings help to better understand the image effect of 99-ends underlying both consumers’ individual differences and contextual effects. Findings also help retailers and pricing managers in their use of 99-ends as a promotional technique.

This research contributes to a better understanding of the persuasive promotional effect associated to 99-ends. The study demonstrates that utilitarian benefits cannot fully explain consumers’ responses to 99-ends, as 99-end prices can also provide stimulation, entertainment and help fulfill consumers’ needs for information, exploration and self-esteem. The authors further examine the moderating role of the decision-making style between promotional benefits and proneness to buy 99-ends products. The intuitive mode, either internal or contextual, activates hedonic benefits, whereas the analytical mode activates both utilitarian and hedonic benefits when the mode of processing is internal and only utilitarian benefits when the mode of processing is contextual.

Any reasonably advanced practice is a blend of rational thinking, thinking structured by concepts and numerical representations rendering the world static and immovable, and intuitive thinking, a mode of knowing operating “in‐between” concepts and representations and, therefore, are apprehending the fluid and fleeting nature of being. When moving from being a novice to an expert practitioner, the actor must both appropriate rational thinking and increasingly, as experience is acquired, draw on intuitive thinking. For the novice, the concern is however that intuitive thinking is complicated to articulate or represent but is primarily acquired through years of experience and practice. The paper seeks to discuss practice as a term that includes both these two elements of thinking.

The paper uses empirical examples from nursing work, financial trading, and scientific research to further develop the concept of practice.

The paper suggests that “skilled coping” of expert practitioners are examined as a gradual appropriation and combining of rational and intuitive thinking. The difficulty of becoming a skilled practitioner is, inter alia, to acquire inarticulate know‐how through collaboration with experienced peers.

The paper seeks to discuss the concept of practice based on process philosophy underlining the distinction between rational and intuitive thinking, yet emphasizing their mutual constitution in the domain of practice. The concept of practice is thus anchored in a solid theoretical framework capable of exploring some of the difficulties involved in acquiring expert skills.

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of pension fund managers investment thinking when confronted with challenging investment decisions. The study focuses on the theoretical question of how dual thinking processes in experts’ investment decision-making emerge. This question has attracted interest in economic psychology but has not yet been answered. Here, it is explored in the context of pension funds.

The sample included 22 pension fund managers. The authors explored their decision-making by applying the critical incident interview technique, which entailed collecting investment decisions that fund managers retrieved from recent memory (Flanagan, 1954). Questions concerned the investment situation, the decision-making process and the challenges and uncertainties the fund managers faced.

Many of the 61 critical incidents examined concerned challenging (mostly stock) investments based on extensive analysis (e.g. reliance on external analysts for advice; analysis of massive amounts of hard company and stock market information; scrutiny of company reports and personal meetings with CEOs). However, fund managers to a high degree based their decisions on soft information judgments such as experience and qualitative judgements of teams. The authors found heuristics, intuitive thinking, biases (sunk cost effects) and social influences in investment decision-making.

The sample is small and not randomly selected.

The authors suggest anti-bias training and better acquaintance with human forecasting limitations for pension fund managers.

Pension fund managers’ investment thinking has not previously been investigated. The authors show the types of investment situations in which analytical and intuitive thinking and biases occur.

The purpose of this paper is to identify under what circumstances advisor gender and advice justification influence advice taking by managers.

The authors designed a quasirational managerial decision experiment with both analytic and intuitive cues. The design was a 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial, in which gender (male/female) and advice justification (intuitive/analytic) were crossed. The experiment involved two independent samples, taken from Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and Brazilian professionals.

Results suggest that, in general, analytic justification is more valued than intuitive justification. The findings also infer that depending on the advisees’ sample and providing that advice justification is analytic, quasirational scenarios seem to favor male advisors (MTurk sample) or both male and female advisors with “male values” (professional sample), as analysis is traditionally considered a “male value.”

Analytic justification will likely lead to more advice utilization in quasirational managerial situations, as it may act as a safeguard for the accuracy of the offered advice.

The results might signal an ongoing, but slow, process leading to the mitigation of gender stereotypes, considering that the male gender stereotype was active in the MTurk sample, but not in the professional one.

This study contributes to the advice-taking research field by showing the interplay between advisor gender and advice justification in a quasirational managerial decision setting with both analytic and intuitive cues. In advice-taking literature, observations are usually collected from students. However, as this study focused on managerial decisions, the authors collected independent samples from MTurk workers and Brazilian professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the optimal decision-making style in a fast-paced, complex, and dynamic environment.

Three decision-making attributes are explored: the use of intuition vs analysis, the proclivity to heuristics, and susceptibility to bias. The intuition/analysis is tested with a questionnaire that has been validated in prior research, while information on the two other dimensions is from an exploratory survey designed for this purpose. Responses to the survey questions provide some insight into the differential decision-making style of elite NHL hockey coaches’ vis-à-vis amateur coaches and news reporters.

The data suggest elite decision makers have no preference for intuitive or analytical settings, but exhibit a significantly higher perception of their ability to perform in both. While current literature shows sports athletes to be more intuitive, it appears coaches excel on the analytical dimension instead. This study finds that while elite hockey coaches have fewer biases overall, they tend in particular to be overly optimistic in comparison to amateur coaches and news reporters.

The main limitation in this paper is that the survey on heuristics and biases is exploratory, making these results less robust than the findings on intuition and analysis.

This paper is first to extend the decision-making literature to coaches, and among few papers that obtain insights from NHL coaches directly. The findings are likely to extend to corporate leadership as well, increasing the relevance of the results.

The purpose of this study is to theoretically link design thinking with behavioural strategy, using empirical results that relate three cognitive dimensions: design thinking personality traits, cognitive passive resistance and linear thinking, and, consequently, determine: if there is a negative relationship between design thinking traits and cognitive passive resistance and if this relationship is mediated by linear thinking.

This study used a quantitative methodology of covariance-based structural equation modelling. The data were collected from a three-scale, self-completed questionnaire, which was constructed using the existing modelling of the academic literature. The questionnaire was validated by confirmatory factor analysis and applied to a sample of 342 professional engineering and business graduates in Colombia.

The results of the structural equation modelling demonstrate a negative relationship between design thinking traits and cognitive passive resistance, and this relationship is mediated by linear thinking. These findings link design thinking and behavioural strategy and build new foundations for future studies, providing further theoretical support to the academic literature’s discussion of the relationship between design thinking and theories of managerial practices and innovation management.

The main limitation of this study is the subjectivity of the answers because of potential bias from the respondents in completing the questionnaire. Another limitation is that the research was conducted only in the context of Colombia, so it is recommended that other studies be carried to generalise the results. This study has several theoretical implications. This study contributes to existing research on design thinking, evidencing a promising field of study to support it theoretically, such as the behavioural strategy. This study also contributes to the literature on innovation management deepening into a field of study that has received less attention in the literature, such as passive cognitive resistance to innovation. Likewise, this study presents a theoretical contribution to the dual process of cognition, proposing a new dimension to the construction of the multidimensional concept of nonlinear thinking. This study also contributes to the behavioural strategy field, evidencing a growing area of application in strategic management, such as design thinking. Finally, this research also proposes the development of a new research avenue about the concept of knowledge hiding as a possible source of innovation resistance.

This research also has implications for business and engineering education and practice. This study’s results suggest that before implementing an organisational initiative such as design thinking, which seeks to change people's behaviour, it is necessary to approach it as a cognitive process and develop strategies to mitigate passive cognitive resistance to change. This research’s results also present implications for business and engineering education, evidencing the need to include other perspectives of thinking that allow non-designers to develop creative thinking.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first quantitative study on design thinking as a business management concept using linear thinking of non-designers to relate design thinking traits with cognitive passive resistance. This research provides theoretical and empirical support for framing design thinking within the field of behavioural strategy.

The ballooning health misinformation on social media raises grave concerns. Drawing upon the S-O-R (Stimulus-Organism-Response) model and the information processing literature, this study aims to explore (1) how social media health information seeking (S) affects health misinformation sharing intention (R) through the channel of health misperceptions (O) and (2) whether the mediation process would be contingent upon different information processing predispositions.

Data were collected from a survey comprising 388 respondents from the Chinese middle-aged or above group, one of China's most susceptible populations to health misinformation. Standard multiple linear regression models and the PROCESS Macro were adopted to examine the direct effect and the moderated mediation model.

Results bolstered the S-O-R-based mechanism, in which health misperceptions mediated social media health information seeking's effect on health misinformation sharing intention. As an indicator of analytical information processing, need for cognition (NFC) failed to moderate the mediation process. Contrarily, faith in intuition (FI), an indicator reflecting intuitive information processing, served as a significant moderator. The positive association between social media health information seeking and misperceptions was stronger among respondents with low FI.

This study sheds light on health misinformation sharing research by bridging health information seeking, information internalization and information sharing. Moreover, the authors extended the S-O-R model by integrating information processing predispositions, which differs this study from previous literature and advances the extant understanding of how information processing styles work in the face of online health misinformation. The particular age group and the Chinese context further inform context-specific implications regarding online health misinformation regulation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0157.

Design thinking has become an omnipresent process to foster innovativeness in various fields. Due to its popularity in both practice and theory, the number of publications has been growing rapidly. The authors aim to develop a research framework that reflects the current state of research and allows for the identification of research gaps.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review based on 164 scholarly articles on design thinking.

This study proposes a framework, which identifies individual and organizational context factors, the stages of a typical design thinking process with its underlying principles and tools, and the individual as well as organizational outcomes of a design thinking project.

Whereas previous reviews focused on particular aspects of design thinking, such as its characteristics, the organizational culture as a context factor or its role on new product development, the authors provide a holistic overview of the current state of research.