Relation between managerial cognition and industrial performance: An assessment with strategic cognitive maps using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis

Abstract

Strategic management researchers have long been fascinated with company performance in terms of underlying managerial cognition and its interpretation. This paper presents a methodology to examine the linkage between the cognition of individuals and company performance. We link cognitive maps with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and examined the role of standard and newly proposed consistency and coverage formulas in the evaluation of social science data. We investigate the effect of cognitive diversity within a company, and between companies within an industry on company performance using experimental and real-life data. The proposed method used a cognitive mapping approach to elicit strategy frames from individuals in management teams and operationalized their cognitive diversity by distance ratios between individual- and group-level cognitive maps. The results highlight the different opportunities of cognitive diversity to the enhancement of company performance in the market and confirm the usefulness of new fsQCA consistency and coverage measures.