Chapter 3: Metacognition in Strategic Decision Making: An Integrative Review and a Research Agenda

Research on cognitive psychology suggests that individuals can develop a unique high-order cognitive capability to monitor and control their information processing to adjust their behaviors under different circumstances. This capability is known as metacognition and represents a rapidly growing domain of research in cognitive psychology. Researchers in business and management have only recently begun to give attention to metacognitive capabilities of executives and very little has been done to examine how and why metacognition matters in strategic decision making. In this chapter, we posit that executives’ metacognition is a key underexplored psychological factor that could shed new light on the mechanisms that explain why executives vary in their strategic decision making. We develop a framework for the application of metacognition in strategic decision making and propose a set of directions for future research on this emerging field.