The influence of strategic schema and decisiveness of managers on entrepreneurial alertness: exploring the role of experience in shaping information processing

Entrepreneurial alertness is central to opportunity recognition, yet its antecedents and the cognitive processing mechanisms remain poorly understood. This study draws on the theory of lay epistemics, schema theory, and the entrepreneurial alertness framework to examine how antecedents like strategic schema and decisiveness influence alertness, and how managerial experience moderates these effects. A sample of 317 top-level managers from Indian e-commerce firms participated in this study. The data were analyzed by hierarchical multiple regression, followed by interaction analysis using the Johnson-Neyman technique and simple slope analysis. While strategic schema and decisiveness positively influenced alertness, the strength of these effects diminished with increased experience. Among low to moderately experienced managers, these cognitive dispositions had a stronger effect on driving controlled information search and evaluation. However, such effects diminished among highly experienced managers due to heightened passive automaticity and sensory filtering by rigid cognitive structures. The association dimension of alertness, which fosters creativity, was enhanced by strategic schema but not by decisiveness. This study highlights a novel interaction between cognitive dispositions and experience in shaping the dynamics between automatic and controlled processing in alertness, thereby offering preliminary evidence to reconceptualize alertness as a dual-process construct.