Understanding the Essence of the Phenomenon of "Strategic Regret":A Phenomenological Study in the Field of Behavioral Strategy

Learning from the experiences of organizational misconceptions and the subsequent failure along with focusing on the key factors of success, can pave the way to make the decision-making process effective for the future of the business. One of the consequences of making non-optimal decisions at the top levels of the organization is a strategic regret. The present study aims to understand the essence of the strategic regret and attempts to answer the two following questions; what constitutes the phenomenon of "strategic regret"? (What is its scope based on the experiences of managers who have experienced this phenomenon?) and what are the intrinsic and transversal factors of strategic regret based on the experiences of executive managers? The present phenomenological research is a fundamental research in terms of objectives. In addition, in terms of data collection, this research is a description of the post-event method. The statistical population of this research consists of all managers of organizations and companies active in Tehran province that have made (or have not made) decisions in the moment or the past where their organization has faced toubles (or has been prevented from gaining profit) and are now regretful about their decision at that time. Based on purposeful sampling and in order to reach the theoretical saturation 12 people were selected. Semi-structured deep interviews were used to collect data. In this research, the strategy of "transcendental phenomenology of Mustecas” (based on Husserl descriptive phenomenology) was used to analyze the data. Various themes were extracted regarding the nature of the strategic regret and they were classified into two main themes. (A) emotional experiences (consisting of 8 main themes and 21 sub-themes) and (b) cognitive experiences (which consists of 2 main themes and 6 sub-themes). The emotional experiences of the participants regarding strategic regret were in the forms of sense of regret and remorse, sorrow, fear, disappointment and despair, shame, dissatisfaction, loss, and satisfaction. Besides, their cognitive experiences were classified into two categories of feedback and prediction of the likelihood of regret. The results of this research, while introducing the notion of regret into the strategic management literature, have paved the way for the context to be defined, distinguished from similar cases and to set up behavioral strategies at the highest level of the organization.