The cognitive foundation of healthcare organizations’ digitalization: the behavioral strategy perspective

The digitalization of hospitals requires a collective effort from divergent professional groups (the management team, healthcare professionals and IT engineers) that have distinctive knowledge domains, professional interests and work routines. Understanding the cognition, emotion and social behavior across the groups is at the heart for the groups to seek common ground while reserving differences. Drawing on behavioral strategy theory, we reveal the dynamics of developing strategic actions for digitalization by involving actors with diverging interests in decisions. This contributes to our knowledge on healthcare digitalization by identifying the cognitive foundation at the individual and group levels. In so doing, our study extends behavioral strategy research by exploring the cognitive conditions that address the discordant interests of multiple actors in a decision and promote intra-organizational coalitions.