Managers analyze their environment in order to diagnose strategic issues, events which may have an important impact on the organizational performance. But to date little has been said about the role of emotion in the process of strategic issue diagnosis (SID). Our paper focuses on how emotions and social identities can influence SID, which has been primarily discussed from a purely cognitive perspective. First, we build on cognitive appraisal theory of emotion to better predict individual emotional and behavioral responses to strategic issues. Second, we integrate concepts from intergroup emotion theory to predict when these emotional and behavioral responses will be based on group membership. In this way, we can better understand how not only how individuals may personally respond but also how group memberships (or social identities) may influence the process of strategic issue diagnosis. After reviewing both theories of emotion we discuss how both cognitive appraisals and the cognitive dimensions identified by existing SID frameworks can predict specific “discrete emotion” responses to the issue (e.g., joy, anger) in turn predicting specific “behavioral responses” to the issue (e.g., support, reject). We then illustrate when individual-level SID processes become group membership-level and conclude by outlining implications for theory and research.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Université Libre de Bruxelles, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Centre Emile Bernheim (CEB) in its series Working Papers CEB with number
09-009.RS.