Exit or stay: A critical incident analysis of decision-making in conflict-torn countries

Deploying small world representation logic, we examine the context-specific factors that inform managerial decision-making in conflict-torn countries. Drawing on insights from thirty-one managers, we spotlight nine higher-order heuristics that commonly inform MNEs’ mental representations and their managers’ decision to exit or stay. These heuristics were identified by categorising the commonalities arising from our respondents’ accounts on what information they search for (discovery heuristics) and how it was evaluated (evaluation heuristics). We discovered that information accessibility, conditioned by firms’ in-country experiences, is paramount. Furthermore, since employees are strategy shapers, they can undermine the resilience-enhancing benefits of operational flexibility in conflict-torn countries.