Mitigating Inertia Towards Megatrends : An Experimental Investigation of Emotional Activation

The paper explores the executives' decision-making process when facing megatrends. Thereby, we argue that executives' are particularly prone to inertia and delayed strategic responses when confronted with megatrends. Drawing on psychology literature, we propose emotions as pivotal triggers to determine the multitude of alternatives considered and to mitigate inertia in decision-making. Further, we suggest executives' personal involvement and experience to moderate this relationship. The study makes two important contributions. First, by providing first insights on the impact of megatrends on the decision-making process, we answer calls of scholars and practitioners. Second, our study advances cognition and emotion literature by the concept of time-coupled emotions, which benefits our understanding of executives' behavior during the decisionmaking process.