Strategos and Pathos: Examining the influence of affectivity on perceptions of competitive advantage

The cognitive perspective on strategy (Mintzberg etal., 1998; Jenkins & Ambrosini, 2002; Sparrow, 1994), in which this paper is nested, argues that top managers very often resort to a simplified representation of the organizational stimuli in the form of mental models due to their limited cognitive capacities (Schwenk, 1988). The cognitive school on strategy broke new ground when Daniels (1998) established that affect influences strategic cognition, and Daniels (1999) showed that negative affect could influence managers’ perceptions of aspects of the strategic environment. We examine whether managerial perceptions of competitive advantage in terms of firm resources and capabilities might be biased toward optimistic or pessimistic interpretations depending on the nature of strategic actors’ affective state. Data were collected from senior managers attending a management development program at a business school. Our findings indicate that positive affective states yield favorable perceptions of competitive advantage in terms of firm resources and capabilities.