Cognition in Organizational Analysis: Who's Minding the Store?

Abstract

Research on cognition in organizations has focused primarily on managers and how they think while performing a variety of managerial tasks. This approach limits our understanding of cognition at the collective level and the interactive effects across levels of analysis. We propose a framework of cognition — based on structure, process, and style — which can be applied to the individual, group and organizational levels of analysis. By mapping the territory, we observe certain well-travelled routes, while other terrain remains relatively unexplored. This map also identifies theoretical and methodological road blocks which suggest a number of future research directions.