Intuition and Creativity

This chapter will address the human faculty of cognition. In management studies and organization theory, managers and co-workers’ cognitive capabilities have been a source of investigation since the end of the Second World War when Herbert Simon introduced the behavioural theory of decision making. In Simon’s theory, decision making in organizations is determined by what Herbert Simon (1957) calls the bounded rationality of managers and other decision makers. This insight has significant implications for the functioning of organizations. For instance, rather than being concerned with optimal solutions to problems, organizations are merely satisficing their decisions, reaching ‘good enough’ decisions given the degree of ambiguity and chance in a certain situation. Simon’s research programme has been a major source of influence in management studies and organization theory after the Second World War. When speaking of creativity, the notion of intuitive thinking is what is of interest in this chapter. As a subset of cognition, intuition remains one of the least exploited cognitive faculties of human beings in the management literature. Moreover, the role of intuition receives little attention in the literature on organizational creativity. This chapter describes a study of the role of intuition and its implications for organizational creativity within pharmaceutical research.