Cognitive styles in dynamic decision making: a laboratory experiment

Dynamic decision‐making processes of executives are pivotal for a company's performance, especially in hypercompetitive environments in which firms face high discontinuity. In those fast‐paced settings, executives constantly interpret the environment and, accordingly, adapt their decisions. This work investigates, in the dynamic decision‐making process setting, the differences in terms of cognitive style, rapidity and accuracy, among the recently identified ‐ by the dynamic decision‐making literature ‐ adaptive behaviour and the others deviating from it (i.e., fixated, stalled, vagabonding). A laboratory experiment was conducted in which 203 graduate students coped with a dynamic multistep business case and also completed the Myers‐Briggs type indicator test. Results show how dynamic decision‐making behaviours have some differences in rapidity and accuracy and major differences among cognitive styles. The slight difference between some behaviours, such as adaptive and vagabonding, on cognitive styles previously regarded as uninfluential, has here reemerged as pivotal, raising the interest in their study.