When to Talk and When to Keep It to yourself? Strategies for Legitimating Managerial Intuitions in An Organisational Context

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the strategies deployed by managers in organisations to legitimate their intuitions. Managerial practice is a continual process of emergence and integration of problems and projects, and by which managers navigate a complex world. To do so, they rely partly on their intuitions, whose effectiveness has largely been demonstrated in the literature. However, the rational model is still considered the optimal cognition and decision-making process in organisations. The persistence of the myth of rationality compels managers to deploy strategies to legitimate their intuitions. But these strategies are poorly understood. The aim of this study therefore was to describe them. For this purpose, we collected 191 accounts of episodes where managers legitimated their intuitions. Our analysis of these accounts revealed seven intuition legitimation strategies. Some of these strategies had not previously been identified in the institutional literature (personalisation, transparency, exploration and compound strategy). For others which had already been partly described (rationalisation, manipulation and relational strategy), we show that managers deploy new modes. These results contribute to the knowledge of legitimation strategies from a conceptual point of view. They also shed some light on the mistrust of intuition that still prevails in organisations, despite its importance.

Keywords

• intuition
• legitimation
• expertise
• manager