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This paper aims to examine managerial decision-making approaches, their antecedents and consequences in the Arabian Gulf context. Using recent survey data, the study offers a critical assessment of prevailing myths about decision-making styles in the Arabian Gulf.

Survey data were collected from a sample of 432 managers working in public and private sector companies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A combination of statistical techniques including confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and hierarchical regression analysis was used to test research hypotheses.

The findings of this study question the myth that UAE or Gulf managers mostly pursue consultative and participative styles of management. Most UAE managers continue to practice an autocratic and a pseudo-consultative style of decision-making, undermining the value of employee input in the decision-making process. The data revealed a strong negative relationship between autocratic management style and a range of personal and organizational outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior, performance and innovative human resource management practices pertaining to work-family life balance and diversity programs. Most employees perceived autocratic management style as a major source of job stress, absenteeism and turnover. Socio-demographic characteristics of managers and their work organizations, considered as antecedents of decision-making styles, played a limited role in shaping decision-making approaches or their consequences. Globalization and associated socio-cultural changes that UAE and other Gulf region countries have experienced over the past two decades seem to have only a marginal impact on decision-making styles.

Use of perceptual survey data places some constraints on the generalizability of our findings. Future research may address this issue with multiple data sources including an in-depth case study.

The findings of this research should be of special interest to both domestic and multinational companies in seeking alignment of their management approaches with the emerging competitive business environment in UAE and other Gulf countries. Theoretically, the paper documents the value of the continuum theory of managerial behavior in UAE and the Arabian Gulf context.

The study represents a first major effort to develop and test a comprehensive conceptual model of antecedents and consequences of managerial decision-making styles in UAE, which may be extended to other countries in the Arabian Gulf region. The value-added contribution of the study may be seen in its critical analysis of prevailing beliefs and assumptions about management practices in the Arabian Gulf.

The study aims at clarifying whether locus of control may act as a bias in organisational decision‐making or not.

Altogether 44 managers working at Skanska (a Swedish multinational construction company) participated in the study. They were asked to complete a booklet including a locus of control test and a couple of decision tasks. The latter were based on case scenarios reflecting strategic issues relevant for consultative/participative decision‐making.

The results revealed that managers with low external locus of control used group consultative decision‐making more frequently than those with high locus of control. There was also a tendency showing that high externals more frequently used participative decision‐making than low externals. This was in line with the general trend, indicating that managers on the whole predominantly used participative decision‐making.

The results of the present study are valuable for HRM practice, especially with regard to the selection of individuals to management teams.

This study focuses primarily on exploring the role of organizational culture and level of technology used in the organization as predictors of decision‐making styles in a non‐western country, the United Arab Emirates. Results suggest that organizational culture, and level of technology used in the organization in addition to decision‐maker’s education and management levels are good predictors of decision‐making styles in such an environment. Results also indicate that a tendency towards the participative style prevails among Arab, young, middle management and highly educated managers.

The “Peter Principle” is contradicted here. Alternative methods of decision making and research are examined and it is concluded that many organisations have untapped reservoirs of skill and experience which, if utilised, could increase the talent available to companies.

The process of making an original music album is highlighted to illustrate aspects of the music production process in addition to how leadership and related factors play out during this process. Background information is detailed regarding musicians as entrepreneurs, the music production process, group dynamics, learning approaches, aspects of group dynamics, and an emphasis on more shared, distributive forms of leadership. The conceptual framework and results of the ethnographic field study describe a music production process consisting of the following phases: Pre-Production; Production; and Post-Production, with decision-making, direction-setting, and overall leadership approaches playing out at each phase. Reflections, key learnings, and recommendations for future research are presented, all centering on the usefulness in identifying the process of original music production.

Previous literature has compared the effectiveness of different styles of leadership, yet most of this research has not compared different levels of analyses regarding leader styles or behaviors. This shortcoming often limits our understanding of how leadership acts on a phenomenon of interest to a single level of analysis. This article develops a computational model and describes a levels-based comparison of four types of leadership that represent three different levels: individual, dyad, and group. When examined across a dynamic group decision-making optimization scenario, group-based leadership is found to produce decisions that are closer to optimal than dyadic-based and individual-based leadership. An alternative computational model varying individual cognitive and experience-based components among group members also indicates that group-based leadership produces more optimal decisions. First published in Leadership Quarterly (Dionne, S. D., & Dionne, P. J. (2008). Levels-based leadership and hierarchical group decision optimization: A simulation. Leadership Quarterly, 19, 212–234), this version offers an updated introduction discussing simulation as a theoretical development tool and supplies additional evidence regarding the growth of simulation methods in leadership research.

The clear specification of leadership efforts spanning levels of analysis has lagged behind leadership research in general. Simulation modeling, such as agent-based modeling, provides research platforms for exploring these interesting issues. This chapter uses agent-based models, along with Dionne and Dionne's (2009) choices of leadership styles, to examine the impact of those styles on the generation of an emergent group resource, context-for-learning (CFL), instead of the specific task outcome (group decision making) described by Dionne and Dionne. Consistent effectiveness is found across leadership styles for workgroups with high and slightly lower initial individual levels of a CFL. A second agent-based model includes the ability of agents to forget previous learned skills and reveals a reduced effectiveness of all leadership styles. However, the effectiveness of the leadership styles differs between the two outcomes (the specific group task model and the emergent group resource model). Reasons for these differences are explored, and implications from the comparisons of the two models are delineated.

The dependent variables for this analysis include three measures of arms embargo effectiveness, which were referred to as ‘levels of effectiveness’ in the Framework Chapter. These are the embargo's success in causing a targeted policy change (level I effectiveness), success in changing arms flow to the target (level II effectiveness), and a measure of effectiveness to capture the arms embargo initiators satisfaction with the operation of the embargo (level III effectiveness).

In an earlier study reported in the Journal of Educational Administration (17, 1, May 1979), Dufty and Williams analysed decision‐making procedures and managerial styles of Heads of Departments (HODs) at WAIT, now Curtin University, and compared their findings with an earlier study by Dufty of business managers. Of the two groups, the former were found to be more likely to use participatory and power‐sharing procedures than the latter. However, a decade on, the present paper analyses the same two aspects of leader behaviour in a broader sample of HODs in professional and business organisations. In contrast with the Dufty and Williams study, evidence is presented to show a high level of commonality (and a low rating of basic differences) between professional and business leaders. It is proposed that leaders in both kinds of organisations tend to reveal more people‐related styles and preferences for participative procedures in decision‐making in their leadership of their people at work.

An analysis of decision‐making procedures and managerial styles of department heads in an academic institution is used to test the contingency model of managerial leadership. The procedures and styles of thirty academic heads are compared with those reported in other studies of managers in private enterprises and public bureaucracies. In both the academic and non‐academic situations, decisions and styles range over autocratic, participatory and delegative approaches. Evidence is put forward that the academic heads are, on average, as effective as managers in the other sectors but that they tend to use participatory and power‐sharing procedures more than their counterparts in private industry and public service. The contingency theory of managerial leadership seems therefore to be supported by this study.