Decision-Making Processes in the Workplace
The article mentions Daniel Kahneman without explaining much about him. We will get to know him much better in the next section when we start to think about thinking.
Sometimes the most well-structured decision-making processes go awry, not because
of the process itself, but because of the participants or the environment. This article shows us what can go wrong and how to get things back on track to meet
your TOR deliverables.
The article discusses obstacles to improved decision-making, including "cognitive limitations, heuristics and biases and individual inclinations". Heuristics are mental shortcuts individuals use to solve problems. These have great use, for instance, telling humans to run when they see a saber-toothed tiger without thinking too much about the decision. The choice of which cat to adopt from a shelter today may require less use of heuristics and more cognitive exercise.
Introduction
In complex social environments such as workplace organizations, decision-making has been considered an important factor (along with commitment, work engagement, etc.) contributing to organizational efficiency and workplace satisfaction. For this reason, such approaches as the model of organizational choice, strategic decision-making and naturalistic decision-making have been formulated based on the investigation of the role of the organizations on decision makers. Indeed, classical studies in the decision-making domain usually have focused on the internal validity of the research and are therefore frequently carried out in experimental settings. The focus of organizational studies is mostly based on psychometric instruments exploring individual differences by using within-person studies, while decision-making research makes extensive use of experiments. However, research has been gaining increasing appreciation for individual differences in decision-making processes and decision-making styles, the antecedent factors that may predict sound decision-making, and the predictive validity of rational responding. For instance, Miller and Byrnes developed a self-report measure to assess individual differences in " decision-making competency," which can be characterized as the tendency to be self-regulated and use metacognitive processes to examine choice options and master decisions. This definition has been supported by studies involving objective measures of decision-making competence.
Although prior work has supported the notion that individual differences in decision-making competency (DMCy) exist and possess considerable predictive validity, no empirical research, to our knowledge, has directly explored its associations with workplace and psychological variables such as job performance, job demands, job resources, exhaustion, etc. This contribution presents a bridge between research advances in decision-making and I/O research, in relation of variables of one of the most comprehensive psychological model: the JD-R one. The aim is to enlighten the role of such decision-making differences and some organizational (i.e., job demands, job resources) and psychological variables (i.e., exhaustion) which can positively or negatively affect performance. For instance, studying the relationships between the DMCy and variables abovementioned, provide new insights about how the work environment and connected psychological variables interfere with decision-making processes (e.g., is the presence of job resources helpful for the decision maker? Do low job demands link to better quality of choices made at work? How can exhaustion alter decision-making?). The role of work environment and its management are considered in this study as a key skill, namely decision environment management (DEM), defined as the sensitivity to the work environment capable of having an effect on complex decision-making processes. In relation to the aim of this study, these two decisional competences (i.e., DMCy; DEM) are supposed to be related to performance and moderated by components enclosed in the JD-R model.