Eugene Sadler-Smith

University of Surrey · Surrey Business School

Intuitions are judgements that arise automatically and non‐consciously. Recognising when intuitive judgements are being used and whether doing so is appropriate is an important skill both for HR practitioners and managers involved in human resource (HR) processes. Because ‘intuiting’ is involuntary and unconscious it is difficult to access, monitor...

Insight and intuition are important concepts in creativity research and creative behavior with applications in a wide variety of professional and business domains. Understanding and articulating their similarities and differences is important theoretically and practically. Researchers and practitioners can benefit from the application of new techni...

This article is about how hubris, individually and collectively, has contributed to the climate emergency and how an environmental ethic of humility could play an ameliorating role in the crisis. It focuses on the relationship between virtue ethics and the natural environment, and it argues that a collective “human hubris” (“The Problem”) has contr...

This paper explores the potential of machine learning for recognizing and analysing linguistic markers of hubris in CEO speech. This research is based on three assumptions: hubris is associated with potentially destructive leader behaviours; linguistic utterances are a way of distinguishing between leaders who are likely to exhibit such behaviours;...

This article explores the link between CEOs’ language and hubristic leadership. It is based on the precepts that leaders’ linguistic utterances provide insights into their personality and behaviours; hubris is associated with unethical and potentially destructive leadership behaviours; if it is possible to identify linguistic markers of CEO hubris...

Hubris and narcissism overlap, and although extant research explores relationships between them in terms of characteristics, attributes, and behaviours, we take a different view by analysing their differences in relation to power and leadership. Drawing on a psychology of power perspective, we argue that narcissistic and hubristic leaders relate to...

Intuition is an important mechanism by which organizational actors make significant decisions; however, precisely how intuitive decisions are taken is not well understood and hence is worthy of closer scrutiny. First-response decisions, because of the conditions under which they are executed, offer researchers an interesting and relevant context fo...

Paradox and dual‐process theories are used by management and organization researchers in studying a variety of phenomena across a wide range of management sub‐fields. Cognition is a focal point of both of these theories. However, despite their growing importance and shared areas of inquiry, these two theories have developed largely in isolation fro...

This article establishes the foundation for research on collective intuition through a study of decision making and organizational learning processes in police senior management teams. We conceptualize collective intuition as independently formed judgement based on domain-specific knowledge, experience and cognitive ability, shared and interpreted...

As well as setting the scene for the section and contextualizing the four main contributions, this chapter also reviews how insights from fields such as the psychology of thinking and reasoning, social psychology, social cognitive neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology have implications both for how virtue is construed theoretically and its impl...

Creative process research has identified the role of certain cognitive abilities, affective processes, and personality traits in the creative process, but has accorded less emphasis to the role of aesthetic knowing in this process. In this study we contribute a set of empirical findings which portray that aesthetic knowledge plays a fundamental rol...

The objective of this research was to understand the phenomenon of intuition from the perspective of the intuitor. Against a background of a steadily growing interest in intuition in managerial decision research, and inclining towards a phenomenological stance, the research used a novel linguistic method based on ‘de-nominalization’ to access parti...

On a visit to the London School of Economics (LSE) in November 2008, Her Majesty the Queen understatedly but pointedly inquired why no one had noticed beforehand that the credit crunch was on its way. In response, a Forum was held at the British Academy, the purpose of which was to draft the basis of an ‘unofficial command paper’ to answer the Quee...

The Problem Climate change is the most pressing environmental issue of our times. The majority of reputable scientists are in agreement that it threatens dangerous and irreversible impacts on the whole-Earth system. The mitigation of its potential effects requires immediate, substantial, and sustained actions. The Solution This article proposes tw...

Based on a detailed reading of Graham Wallas’ Art of Thought (1926) it is argued that his four-stage model of the creative process (Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification), in spite of holding sway as a conceptual anchor for many creativity researchers, does not reflect accurately Wallas’ full account of the creative process. Instead,...

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the phenomenon of creativity as experienced by world-leading chefs in the organizational setting of their creative industry - haute cuisine. By capturing holistically the complexities and interactions of high-level creativity in high-performance settings, we endeavoured to illustrate how world-lea...

Ethnography of Communication offers new analytical and interpretive possibilities for contextually sensitized, language- and communication-based ethnographic studies of management and organization. In this article we provide an introduction and overview of relevant linguistic and related fields, positioning Ethnography of Communication within the b...

Entrepreneurial intuition is the affectively charged recognition and evaluation of a business venturing opportunity arising as a result of involuntary, rapid, non-conscious, associative processing. This article integrates theories of dual-processing and models of the business venturing (opportunity recognition, evaluation, and exploitation) in a mo...

The journal’s 2-year impact factor currently stands at 1.25 and the 5-year impact factor at 1.89 in the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports (2014). In terms of 5-year trends, the journal’s mean 2-year impact factor stands at a healthy 1.37. As far as journal quality lists go, we await with interest the outcome of the revision to the United Kin...

This article outlines the principal advances in the scientific study of intuition that have a bearing on organizational behavior and related subfields of the management and organization sciences. Following major developments in the social neurosciences, personality, and individual differences, especially dual-process conceptions of human cognition,...

Front-line decisions taken by first-responders, such as police officers and police staff, are taken under conditions of time-pressure, uncertainty and volatility they therefore afford an interesting and relevant context for researchers to study intuition in an occupational setting. We used the first-hand accounts of high and low performing police o...

Purpose – This qualitative study of managers’ use of intuition in the selection process aimed to understand if and how managers use intuition in employee hiring decisions and suggest ways in which the use of intuition might be improved. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were...

Purpose – This study aims to make sense of global warming. Using the concept of design science (as distinct from explanatory science) and by drawing on recent debates in management and organization studies, the study considers whether the principal mission of human resource development (HRD) research should be to design and develop actionable knowl...

This article is concerned with the design science approach as a potential enabler of problem-focused and solution-led HRD research. The article highlights the issues of the relevance and impact of HRD research and considers the design science approach as one way of resolving these matters. It summarizes by way of background the origins and precepts...

In the literature, relationship oriented firms are being advised to exploit organizational learning as a route through which to acquire the knowledge required to survive in rapidly changing and/or highly competitive markets. There is, however, only limited anecdotal evidence of the positive contribution that organizational learning can make to enha...

Even though it is argued that intuition has ‘come of age’ in the behavioral sciences, there are still unresolved issues regarding self‐report assessment of intuitive and analytical styles of information processing (cognitive styles). The unitary view proposes that intuition and analysis are opposite ends of a single continuum. The dual view propose...

This article combines theories of environmental virtue ethics and organizational virtuousness in proposing the idea of “organizational environmental virtuousness.” In doing so it draws attention to the fact that previous “green management” scholarship has emphasized reduction of harm and adherence to norms and overlooked the significance of positiv...

Research attests to the perils of hubristic leadership in politics, the military and business organizations, however whilst researchers have identified hubris' correspondences with personality disorders and various organizational and individual level factors, the cognitive and affective antecedents of hubris have been largely overlooked. In this pa...

Biological, brain, and behavioral sciences offer strong and growing support for the virtue ethics account of moral judgment and ethical behavior in business organizations. The acquisition of moral agency in business involves the recognition, refinement, and habituation through the processes of reflexion and reflection of a moral sense encapsulated...

In this historical review we chart the progress of intuition research over the past eight decades. We highlight the distinction between intuition research in management and intuition research in base disciplines and related fields, and offer a critical commentary on the ways in which the dynamic between these two historical threads has affected pro...

What is ‘gut feeling’ and how can it be harnessed? To what extent should business decisions be informed by ‘instincts’ which may seem irrational or impossible to quantify?

In recent years, the topic of intuition has become an important focus of attention in psychology. It is often assumed to be a unitary construct; however, recent research suggests that intuition is multifaceted. This article disaggregates intuition by discriminating between domain-general mechanisms and domain-specific processes of intuiting and pri...

Creative industries are firms which are characterized largely by the labour inputs of creative individuals, and surrounded by a degree of rhetoric as to their significance, but are a comparatively under-researched sector. In this study we developed a research framework which integrated entrepreneurial cognition, entrepreneurial orientation and firm...

In line with increased attention on the application of cognitive approaches to industrial, work and organizational psychology, the last 40 years have witnessed a growing interest in application of the cognitive style construct to the field of business and management. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we wish to advance understanding of...

The study explored various facets of the intuitive style and its relevance to learning and education from a dual-processing perspective, namely how it relates to other style constructs (analytical; visual and verbal; local and global), gender, and superstitious reasoning and how these are likely to impact upon learning in educational and occupation...

Background. The study was conducted in the context of a number of comparative studies into student approaches to studying, particularly in an Asian context, and used the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory (RASI). Aims. (i) Explore the cross cultural validity of the RASI; (ii) compare the approaches to studying of Hong Kong and UK students; (i...

Summary Interest in the phenomenon of intuition in business and management has grown rapidly in recent years; however whilst there have been significant theoretical advances, empirical work has lagged somewhat. We studied the phenomenon of intuitive decision making in the banking and finance sector through the use of in-depth semi-structured interv...

Hayes, Allinson, Hudson, and Keasey (2003) maintain that the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence presented by Hodgkinson and Sadler-Smith (2003) in support of an alternative two-dimensional conception of the Allinson-Hayes Cognitive Style Index (CSI) are insufficiently robust to challenge the original unidimensional formulation and that, a...

In both education and training an important aspect of the design, development and delivery of learning is the role of individual differences between learners in terms of their ‘learning styles’. One may identify four broad categories of what have been termed ‘learning style’: (i) ‘cognitive personality elements’ (e.g. Witkin et al. 1977; Riding, 19...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine conceptual and theoretical links between intuition and coaching; investigate accomplished coaches' practical experiences of intuition; identify skill set of an intuitive coach; discuss implications of findings for coaches', HRD professionals', and line managers' learning and development. Design/metho...

We are fortunate in becoming the new joint Editors-in-Chief of Management Learning for several reasons: first, because it is an honour and privilege to serve the community of management learning scholars in this vitally important editorial capacity; second, because we take on these roles at a significant juncture for the journal, namely the publica...

This study provides insights into the methodological practices of the field of cognitive styles research over the past two decades and aims to shed light on possible gaps and avenues for future research. Based on a carefully designed selection process, 102 style-related articles within the field of business and management were included in our metho...

Research on silence within organizations and learning is sparse. This article is concerned with exploring the concept of silence in organizational settings, delineating its various forms (silent and silenced) and critically examining the relevance of these various manifestations for management and organizational learning. Following a brief review o...

Research on individual differences in information processing is characterized by two incompatible theoretical perspectives. The unitary view postulates that analysis and intuition are the opposite poles of a single dimension, whereas the dual-process view proposes that they are independent constructs. We investigated this issue using two establishe...

Recent advances in social cognitive neuroscience and related fields have rejuvenated scholarly research into intuition. This article considers the implications of these developments for understanding managerial and organizational decision making. Over the past two decades, researchers have made considerable progress in distinguishing intuition from...

In business, there is little doubt that managers use their intuitions when making decisions. But in spite of the fact that intuition and rationality are two parallel systems of knowing, intuition is often considered the antithesis of rationality and is overlooked, disregarded, or acted on covertly by managers. What is also clear is that intuition i...

This important Handbook explores how to make sense of dynamic environments and respond strategically to them during the 21st century. Leading scholars of strategic management are brought together to offer innovative and multi-disciplinary perspectives on the past, present and future of strategy formulation and foresight. In so doing they challenge...

Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth In management and executive education which, paradoxically, has been accompanied by a crisis of confidence manifested in debates about its direction, relevance, and effectiveness. Outside academia, innovative corporate training enterprises increasingly provide the type of management training whe...

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The problem and the solution. Intuitions are rapid, affectively charged judgments arrived at without conscious awareness of the reasoning processes involved. Intuiting is one of the principal means by which managers and other professionals are able arrive at judgments in relation to complex problems in loosely structured environments. Intuition has...

The concept of intuition has, until recently, received scant scholarly attention within and beyond the psychological sciences, despite its potential to unify a number of lines of inquiry. Presently, the literature on intuition is conceptually underdeveloped and dispersed across a range of domains of application, from education, to management, to he...

In recent years there has been a growth of interest in the role played by intuitive judgment in entrepreneurial cognition and behavior. However, the significance of the role of affect in intuitive judgment has been underplayed by entrepreneurship researchers. In response to this theoretical and empirical shortcoming we propose recognition-primed de...

i> Purpose - To show that a key aspect of learning and development of individual employees is that of self-directedness. This paper will consider the role of the leader in facilitating workforce development in terms of employees' self-directedness for learning. The research was designed to investigate the views that 'learning leaders' in organizati...

In spite of the fact that researchers suggest that managers use intuition when making decisions and solving problems, management education and development has largely ignored or shied away from including intuition in its curriculum. There are few. if any, reported or reported-and-evaluated attempts at the development of managers' intuitive awarenes...

Continuing professional development is often seen as a means of protecting professional autonomy and maintaining privileged status. This article explores recent debates. A missing perspective on how professional learning occurs is explored using practice-based learning. The purposeful practice of professionals is considered with particular attentio...

The concept of intuitive judgment is traditionally associated with the heuristics and biases research of Kahneman, Tversky, and others. Within this paradigm, subjective probabilities are numerical expressions of beliefs concerning uncertain events that may be assessed using heuristics that reduce complex computational tasks to simpler judgmental on...

Improvisation consists of a combination of intuition, creativity, and bricolage. Intuitions are rapid, affectively charged, holistic judgements arrived at without the apparent intrusion of rational thought. Improvisation and intuition represent two important and related aspects of management in general and of the management of projects in particula...

This paper outlines the limitations of a technical rationalist approach to HRD practice without seeking to negate it. It then offers a complementary view based on Schon's notion of the reflective practitioner which exhorts HRD practitioners to embrace complexity and reflection. We outline, first, a number of dimensions of diversity which confer com...

In this paper we reflect upon the significance of instructors' tacit knowledge, and ultimately their intuition, in effective classroom performance. Our aim is to help educators understand their intuition and ultimately enhance their instructional effectiveness by making better classroom decisions on the basis of intuitive judgments. We outline the...

Purpose In preparing managers for the uncertainty, threats and opportunities posed by the challenge of frequent and unexpected changes in organizations and markets, an alternative to a traditional Western viewpoint is a holistic approach that embodies balance and harmony, sees more subtle relationships and avoids the tensions of opposites. The purp...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a selection of papers from the 10th Annual European Learning Styles Information Network Conference. Design/methodology/approach – The paper looks at problems, developments in the application of style and potential styles for practice in the area of cognitive and learning styles in education and t...

Taking a fresh and innovative approach to the complexities and challenges inherent in organizational learning diversity, the authors show that there are no generic solutions. They argue there is no 'best way' of planning, organizing and implementing learning in relation to the workplace and instead provide context-specific solutions to the dilemmas...

No This article describes the development and validation of a measure of a firm's organizational learning orientation and considers the relationships between this and firm performance. The measure assesses owner-managers’ perceptions of their organizations’ orientation to learning in terms of higherorder (active) and lower-order (passive) levels of...

Purpose To examine the psychometric properties and construct validity of the general decision making style (GDMS) questionnaire in two UK samples. Design/methodology/approach – The GDMS takes the form of a self‐report questionnaire which identifies five decision making styles: rational, intuitive, dependent, avoidant, and spontaneous. It was admini...

Even though the conditions under which executives operate may sometimes limit or even preclude the use of rational analysis, it is nevertheless the norm in many organizational decision processes. Intuition, on the other hand, is often considered to be the antithesis of this approach and is usually overlooked or disregarded in decision-making. Howev...

The article discusses a study that argues that the development of intuitive awareness is an important but neglected area of management education and that managers who possess an understanding and appreciation of intuition may be better equipped to cope with complex, dynamic and uncertain environments. The article states that its purpose is to repor...

There has been a considerable growth in the use of flexible methods of delivery for workplace learning and development. However, in designing programmes of flexible learning there is often the assumption that learners will exhibit uniformity in the ways in which they process and organise information (cognitive style), in their predispositions towar...

A long-standing dilemma in theories of management surrounds the question of whether effective managerial action is better served by 'rational analysis' or 'creative intuition'. In the present article, analysis and intuition are conceived within a framework of cognitive style in which a distinction is drawn between the processing of information (rat...

Computer-assisted learning (CAL) is becoming ever more important as a method of teaching and facilitating learning in an increasingly overburdened higher education sector in the UK. A number of authors have made pleas for more evaluation and research in the area of CAL. This study set out to evaluate the attitudes to CAL amongst over 300 business a...

Allinson and Hayes (1996) in the reporting of a new measure, the Cognitive Style Index, made a plea for replication and extension of their work. Using a sample of over one thousand subjects the present study investigated the CSI's construct and concurrent validity. A maximum likelihood factor analysis obtained broadly similar results to those of Al...

Work autonomy is one important component of job design theory which in recent decades has been elaborated upon by a number of researchers who have argued that it may be disaggregated into separate work method, work schedule and work criterion autonomy facets. Breaugh (1985) developed the Work Autonomy Scales as measures of each of these. This artic...

Recently researchers have debated the nature and significance of the cognitive style construct as a basis for understanding individual differences in behaviour in organizations. Two rival theoretical traditions prevail, one group of scholars arguing that cognitive style is best conceived within complex, multidimensional frameworks, others contendin...

Organisational learning is increasingly being mentioned in the literature as a mechanism for assisting the market performance of small firms. There exists, however, limited empirical evidence on the learning systems utilised to manage the process. A survey was undertaken to acquire data on whether a relationship exists between learning style and th...

Some firms are using relationship marketing linked to knowledge management systems to achieve competitive advantage. Limited empirical evidence exists on the contribution that relationship marketing and knowledge management systems can make towards market success. E-commerce provides an opportunity to assess possible relationships that may exist be...

Considerable effort has been devoted to identifying the general characteristics of entrepreneur; however, much of this has been conducted from a trait–based rather than from a behavioral perspective. In this study of small firms in the United Kingdom, we explored the relationships among managerial behaviors (based upon a competence model), entrepre...

Organizational learning is increasingly being mentioned in the literature as a mechanism for assisting small firm survival. There exists, however, limited empirical evidence to validate the benefits claimed for the concept. A survey of small U.K. manufacturing firms was undertaken to ascertain whether entrepreneurial firms use higher-order (or doub...

Swailes and Senior’s (1999) examination of the psychometric properties and factor structure of the Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ) raised a number of questions regarding the instrument’s construct validity and the relationship between learning style and learning process. Swailes and Senior argued that there may be three learning styles as oppos...

In order for businesses to remain competitive it is suggested that across industry there is a requirement for ‘higher and broader’ skills. Universities have an important role to play in satisfying the need for higher level skills training for businesses of all sizes. With respect to small firms, the training and development provided by universities...

Argyris (1962) argued that less emphasis was needed on learned managers and more on learning managers and that learning about the process of learning is a 'timeless wisdom'. Central to a self-awareness and personal understanding of one's own learning processes are theories and principles drawn from cognitive psychology and specifically individual d...

The role of organisational learning in knowledge acquisition for competitive advantage is increasingly found in the literature. Various researchers have used qualitative, single firm case studies to validate a relationship between learning, knowledge and firms exhibiting strong market performance. There is, however, limited empirical evidence on th...

Organisational learning is increasingly being mentioned in the literature as a mechanism for assisting the market performance of small firms. There exists, however, limited empirical evidence on either the benefits conferred by organisational learning and the learning systems utilised to manage the process. A survey of small UK manufacturing firms...