Sharing and Communicating Intuition in Organizational Decision Making

Research on intuition as part of decision making is well established in the fields of management and organization studies. There has been a large number of important theoretical works as well as empirical studies focusing on senior managers’ or executives’ intuition. While such studies are evidence of progress in research on the role of intuition at the individual level, empirical findings on how intuition is shared and communicated in organizations are not abundant. We address this by investigating organizational decision making in the form of project prioritization. We use a rich empirical dataset built from a longitudinal, qualitative study of the prioritization of information technology projects in a large financial institution. Our findings indicate that during project prioritization meetings, managers use four tactics when they share and communicate intuition.