Seize the Day: Executive Thought Self-leadership and Heterogeneity Among Dynamic Managerial Capability Underpinning Cognitive Capabilities

Extant literature has established the importance of individual dynamic managerial capabilities to the enterprise level sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capacities of an organization. Despite theorization that heterogeneity in executive thought processes and thinking disposition stands causal for the oft observed differences in managerial capability between executives, little is known about the individual level antecedents of this cognitive heterogeneity which ultimately influences the direction of the entire firm. In response to calls for future investigation into this critical gap, the present paper draws upon a micro-level theory heretofore underutilized in the strategic realm – self-leadership – to examine how executives’ cognitive processes impact their entire firm. In pursuit of this goal, the cognitive-based thought self-leadership theory is utilized to more thoroughly explain the drivers of heterogeneity among the underlying cognitive capabilities of managers’ crucial dynamic managerial capabilities. In this way, the present study theorizes how specific individual executive cognitive processes (thought self-leadership strategies – e.g., self-talk, mental imagery) can influence the firm-level strategic decisions of innovation and expansion and thus impact overall organizational performance, through the bolstering of individual cognitive capacities and resulting managerial capabilities.