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.
Discussion
The present research links advances in decision-making and in organizational psychology, by presenting how self-regulation processes of decisions are related to performance, and how such relationship can be affected by the presence of exhaustion, job demands, and job resources. Novelties present in the current study are several. First, the methodological aspects here considered present a solution for an antithetical issue which sees decision-making studies mostly experimental and between-subject conceived, and I/O research based on psychometric instruments. Newborn approaches in decision-making originated from studies of self-regulation competency dimension and of environmental decision-making model by Bandura and Wood allow to overcome to this limit by using psychometric instruments developed on purpose for measuring decision-making competences at work. Second, the study extends decision making research applied to the I/O domain in the framework of the JD-R model. The model here proposed explores the role of the exhaustion component, decision-making competences (i.e., DMCy and DEM) and their interactions which have not been tested in the recent decision-making JD-R extension. Third, we have extended studies on decision-making applied to the workplace, frequently confined to some privileged subjects, such as managers or specific professionals, to general workers. This in light of a research emergence which has brought several scholars to reconsider the new role assumed by the work environment and its effect on decision-making processes. Results of the present study reveal the importance of the sensitivity to environmental aspects in decision-making (DEM) as well the role of the competence of making good choices at work (DMCy) in relation to organizational variables. The importance of these characteristics illuminates how decision-making processes in the workplace improve different job performance types and how some JD-R variables can positively or negatively affect such processes.