Decision-Making Processes in the Workplace

The study of the regulation processes in relation to decisions has been addressed in the organizational domain because it has been recognized to be at the root of many problems of underachievement at work. In some professions, such as the medicine, law, and finance, fatigue due to an excessive number of choices can impair the self-regulation mechanisms. The effort required in decision-making processes rapidly depletes personal resources, thus leaving the executive function less efficient when performing other tasks. As information processing increases, greater cognitive resources are required for a competent functioning. When individuals reach the limits of the cognitive capabilities, performance can be undermined because attention is diverted to self-evaluative concerns about the consequences of failure. Considering the individual differences studies reported above, this effect could be more pronounced in less competent self-regulated decision-makers. At support of this speculation, decades of I/O psychology studies have widely analyzed performance impairment due to exhaustion as a consequence of intense physical, affective, and cognitive strain. Literature has deeply documented how the exhaustion induced by depletion of energy can long-term decrease performance, and how individuals use performance-protection strategies. The more the cognitive activation and/or effort at work and the more the physiological costs for the individual are demanding, performance protection is achieved by means of active control of cognitive information processing. The long-term effects of such process may be emptying the individual's stamina and personal resources, resulting in a burnout condition and ultimately affecting performance.

Aside from psychophysical individual strategies, organizations can deal with employee's exhaustion by leveraging job resources, which are work aspects important for goal achievement, personal growth and for minimizing labor costs, such as: supervisor feedbacks, opportunity for development, social support and rewards, etc. Developing decision rules for an optimal adjustment level of instructive feedback to goal attainments or the use of social rewards revealed to have a positive effect on work outcomes, in particular on extra-role performance (i.e., behaviors that support the environment in which task are performed). Similarly, Bakker et al. found job resources (e.g., increasing work autonomy and social support) to be the strongest predictors of extra-role performance, whereas the absence of them can negatively affect engagement and performance too. Organizational resources have a different impact on employees' performance, depending on the subject's attitudes and on perception of utility that individuals have of them (e.g., some employees could find in social support a valuable job resource, for others autonomy is more important than feedbacks from the supervisor, etc.). To maintain satisfactory performance levels, organizations have to master a complex set of decision rules on how to best match employee attributes and sensitivity toward the resources implemented.