Preferable Executives’ Cognitive Style By Stage Of The Organization Life Cycle

There are too many different perspectives in strategic decision-making process within the literature. The rational normative model suggests that organizations, first, based on internal and external analysis determine some objective criteria to achieve value-maximization, and then based on those objectives make decisions. However, many research findings indicated that rational model is moderated by many individual-level and environmental-level factors. At individual-level, rational decision-making model has been found to be affected greatly, by the characteristics of executives. Among those characteristics, cognition has significant effects on decision-making process. Executives have different cognitive style that makes them follow steps of decision making process -including information gathering, alternative generation, alternative evaluation, and decision finalizing- very differently. From the other side, organizations at different stages of organization life cycle (Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline) have different administration needs and required types of decisions. The aim of this conceptual paper is to find out the desirable cognitive style for executives, at each phase of organization life cycle. Additionally, strategy, as the third construct that is related two both cognitive style and organization life cycle help us to explain the cognition-life cycle linkage with more confidence. Based on literature, executives with similar cognitive profile are more likely to follow similar type of strategies; and at each stage of organization life cycle, specific types of strategy is dominant. These findings implicitly support our proposition, indicating that at each stage of organization life cycle, executives with specific cognition profile will outperform. The proposed framework in this paper links strategy, organization life cycle and cognitive style of management.