Exploring the cognitive and emotional microfoundations of (mal)adaptive responses to the coronavirus pandemic: Theory-informed personal reflections from a dynamic managerial capabilities perspective

Informed by recent advances in behavioral strategy, an emerging interdisciplinary subfield of strategic management, this chapter explores the principal psychological reasons why during the most intense phases of the coronavirus pandemic and its immediate aftermath people, organizations, institutions, and wider sociotechnical systems of all shapes and sizes struggled to adapt with alacrity to the many and varied shifting contingencies and uncertainties prevailing. Drawing on his first-hand experience as a member of the senior leadership team of a large and diverse arts, humanities, and social sciences faculty, embedded within an even larger and more complex research intensive university, the author employs the well-known sensing-seizing-reconfiguring/transforming framework (Teece, 2007) to offer his personal reflections on the wide-ranging assortment of cognitive and emotional reactions he and his colleagues encountered as people from all walks of life struggled to comprehend the severity of the situation unfolding, and adjust their goals and behavior accordingly. The author then considers the implications of his reflections more broadly for understanding how a deficit of emotionally authentic dynamic managerial capabilities limited the adaptive efforts of societal stakeholders at all levels and what needs to be done to address this major shortfall.