Emotionalizing Strategy Research with the Repertory Grid Technique

Extant techniques falling under the general umbrella of cognitive mapping/knowledge elicitation have yet to be adapted in ways suitable to enable strategy researchers to investigate how decision makers incorporate emotion and affect into their representations of strategic knowledge, a pressing priority given the mounting evidence concerning the primacy of these factors as a behavioral foundation for dynamic capabilities development. This paper reports the findings of two studies demonstrating the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid technique, a robust method widely known and commonly used in strategic management, for this purpose.