Integrating Intuition and Rationality in Strategic Decision-Making Processes: Insights From Product Development in Multinational Corporations

In this article, we delve into the strategic decision-making process (SDMP) within the context of new product development (NPD), exploring the nuanced interplay between intuition and rationality as key drivers in product innovation. It investigates how top and middle managers in multinational corporations' subsidiaries in The Netherlands navigate the tension between intuitive and rational decision making to enhance the effectiveness of NPD initiatives. Through 15 semistructured interviews, the research identifies six key influencing factors: personality characteristics, cognitive styles, experience, environmental forces, organizational resource constraints, and the strategic importance of decisions. It reveals two distinct integration patterns, intuition–rationality and rationality–intuition, and three latent dimensions influencing decision making: feeling affirmation, experience-based judgment, and holistic information processing. The findings underscore the critical role of integrating intuition and rationality in improving decision-making quality within NPD, particularly in terms of time efficiency, creativity, and persuasion power. This article significantly contributes to the SDMP literature by demonstrating the complex conditions under which intuition and rationality can be seamlessly integrated to achieve superior outcomes in product development, promoting a holistic approach to decision making that is pivotal for innovation and strategic competitiveness in new product initiatives.