Capability Development and Decision Incongruence in Strategic Opportunity Pursuit

In strategic opportunity pursuit, decision incongruence (the gap between the decision‐making rationale that an individual conveys to others and the rationale that informs his/her actual decisions) can lead to difficulties achieving the commitment necessary to grow a venture. To understand why some individuals have greater decision incongruence in strategic opportunity pursuit than others, we conducted a field experiment to test how a configuration of theoretically‐based capability‐building mechanisms—codification, general human capital, and specific human capital—affected 127 CEO s' decision incongruence. The results indicate that codification decreases decision incongruence the most for CEOs with low general but high specific human capital. Copyright © 2012 Strategic Management Society.