The psychological context of strategic decisions: A model and convergent experimental findings

Strategic decision-makers typically are involved in a series of incremental decisions, each affected by a variety of contextual factors. This papers develops a model of the psychological context of strategic decisions and reports two experiments. First, students made reinvestment decisions faced with success or failure feedback on a past decision, high or low perceived organizational slack, and decisions framed to depict a positive or negative future outlook. All three variables had main and interactive effects. Second, managers made similar decisions in a related experimental design. Results confirmed and extended the initial findings. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.