Managerial Cognition, Search and Strategy: Essays on Microfoundations

Abstract

Search is a fundamental aspect of decision-making, strategy and innovation. Despite a strong focus on search at the organizational level, the individual level has been under-explored – despite the fact that search is ultimately a human endeavour. To overcome this gap, the main research question guiding my dissertation is: How do selected individual abilities influence search behaviour, and ultimately performance? In each of the included papers, I highlight the role of a specific cognitive capability as a driver of search behaviour and ultimately performance. I interact individual abilities with environmental factors to better understand organizational-level outcomes. Paper 1 examines temporal focus. Temporal focus can be described as the degree of attention devoted to the dimensions of past, present and future, respectively. Our results reaffirm past findings: that temporal attention does indeed impact strategic performance, controlling for the environment. We also find that temporal focus has a different impact on strategic performance depending on the dimension of temporal focus under investigation. Paper 2 focuses on how emotions and work-life concerns affect the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur. Paper 3 looks at working memory. While controlling for the setting, we find that heterogeneous strategies emerge, and show that differences in working memory affect people’s propensity to explore, which in turn explains performance. Finally, in paper 4, we examine persistence. Our results support the findings that individual search is indeed adaptive and driven by performance feedback. Our findings show that persistent individuals perform more exploitative search, and that persistence is an important moderator in the relationship between performance feedback and search behaviour. Overall, this dissertation serves to enrich the literature on the microfoundations of search and strategy. I rely on multiple methods, including experiments, interviews and linguistic analysis, and show that temporal focus, working memory and persistence are important drivers of search behaviour, strategy and ultimately performance. Through this dissertation, I open up the “black box” of search behaviour to reveal the capabilities of entrepreneurs, managers and decision-makers in general that contribute to organizational-level performance.