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This research aims to examine how decision-makers’ demographic traits affect the integration of foreign workforce into Tirolean (Austria) companies. With continuous world migrations, Tirol experiences a great inflow of foreign workforce. While integrating into the workforce, the foreign workers interact with various decision-makers whose demographic traits (e.g., age, gender, nationality) potentially influence the success of the integration process. To gather data on the integration levels of a foreign workforce, the author conducted a questionnaire. Furthermore, several statistical analyses were run to determine if the relationship between demographic characteristics and integration success exists. The study reveals that demographic characteristics influence decision-makers’ acceptance of expatriates, as well as their recruitment, integration, and training and development outcomes. The empirical results indicate the strength of relationships identified through analyses. The study is limited to geographical, as well as the scope of the sample size, as the data are obtained from Tirol only. In addition, the results from the study serve as a basis for future discussions and research.

We review previous research on intergenerational conflict, focusing on the practical implications of this research for organizational leaders. We explain how the interaction between the interpersonal and intertemporal dimensions of intergenerational decisions creates the unique psychology of intergenerational decision-making behavior. In addition, we review the boundary conditions that have characterized much of the previous research in this area, and we examine the potential effects of loosening these constraints. Our proposals for future research include examination of the effect of intra-generational decision making on intergenerational beneficence, consideration of the role of third parties and linkage issues, investigation of the effects of intergenerational communications and negotiation when generations can interact, examination of the role of social power in influencing intergenerational interactions, investigation of the interaction between temporal construal and immortality striving, and exploration of the ways in which present decision makers detect and define the intergenerational dilemmas in their social environments.

Business and society have been known to be interlinked by a thread called sustainability. However, over the years, this thread has lost its strength because of the dominance of an instrumental perspective towards corporate sustainability (CS). Literature shows that there are innumerable tensions around CS decisions and propose several reasons why decision-makers predominantly resort to the instrumental perspective (CS as a mean) rather than the intrinsic perspective (CS as an end) when addressing these tensions. In this chapter, the authors offer a novel solution to overcome this issue by adapting the existing definition of moral imagination (MI) from the business ethics domain to the CS domain with the help of climate science literacy and mental models of climate phenomena. The authors posit that practicing this adapted MI can facilitate decision-makers to move from the instrumental perspective to adopt an intrinsic perspective through integrative and paradox approaches when handling tensions in CS decisions. The authors contribute to the broad field of sustainability by proposing a conceptual framework that links MI to the intrinsic perspective of CS decisions. This chapter not only offers several theoretical contributions and future research directions but also posits that the empirical verification of this framework can offer much-needed insights to managers and policy-makers to combat one of the significant threats to the survival of our planet, climate crisis.

Although cultural beliefs about gender differences in emotional experience and expression are pervasive, empirical evidence does not always bear out those beliefs. This disjuncture has led scholars to argue for the examination of specific emotions in specific contexts in order to understand more clearly the conditions under which gender differences emerge. Heeding this call, we focus on the justice context, reviewing and investigating men's and women's feelings about and emotional displays regarding distributive justice. Using a vignette study, we specifically examine how gender and the contextual factors of procedural justice, legitimacy of the decision-maker, and gender of the decision-maker affect emotional responses of injustice victims. We argue that a focus on the gender combination of actors in a situation moves the study of gender and emotions beyond the assumption that gender-specific cultural beliefs dictate individual's feelings across situations. Our findings show few gender differences in the experience and expression of anger, resentment, and satisfaction. Rather, contextual factors, including the gender of the decision-maker, had stronger effects on emotional responses than gender of the victim. In our justice situation, then, context matters more than gender in understanding emotional responses.

This article addresses purchasing decisions and the use of total cost of ownership (TCO) information. TCO is based on a monetary quantification of nonfinancial attributes and aggregation into a summary measure (such as cost per hour, per wafer, or per kilometer). From an accounting point-of-view, one intricate issue is the accuracy of the monetary quantification and how this affects decision-making. We distinguish three different kinds of inaccurate monetary quantification, and we investigate the weight that decision makers attach to attributes that are inaccurately monetarily quantified and subsequently included in TCO information. Specifically, we investigate whether this weight depends on reflective thinking and experience. This question is relevant beyond TCO, for all decision-making situations that involve monetary quantification of attributes and subsequent aggregation, such as in activity-based costing, net present value calculations for capital budgeting decisions, or cost-benefit analyses in public administration.

We found support for the hypothesis that reflective thinking increases the weight decision makers attach to the attribute that is included as a minimum cost in the TCO-numbers, but not for the hypothesis that reflective thinking would reduce the weight attached to the attribute that is included as a maximum cost in the TCO-numbers. Students and practitioners differed significantly in the weight they attached to an attribute that was excluded from the TCO-numbers, and practitioners gave less weight to such attributes. Together these results suggest that TCO-numbers should be provided with care and possible inaccuracies should be clarified.

The aim of this research is to contribute to the understanding of how commercial diplomats lobby for public procurement contracts. The institutional environment has ramifications for the manner of lobbying and for the practice of commercial diplomacy. This research brings together these streams of literature, and a conceptual model is developed. By means of an in-depth, single-case study, investigating the lobbying activities of EU diplomats in Indonesia, the study aimed to illustrate the model and draw the list of lobbying activities applicable for commercial diplomats. The findings reveal that in a weak institutional development environment, the diplomats focus on informational lobbying and rely heavily on their networks. If the decision-making powers are decentralized, the diplomats target more decision-makers. If diplomats do not have an access to decision-makers then ‘voice’ lobbying is applied. If the decision-makers are not elected, the diplomats do not engage in constituency-building lobbying. The findings illustrate the plausibility of the introduced conceptual model. They also suggest that domestic factors, such as interest in the host country, priority status of the host country and historical bilateral ties can positively influence the lobbying activities of the diplomats as well.

This chapter applies an “integrative” model to examine the impact and interaction of economic and moral/social factors in the corporate tax compliance context. More specifically, it examines whether social norms moderate the effect of economic factors in this context.

Fifty-five MBA students assumed corporate CFO roles and analyzed a proposed aggressive corporate tax shelter transaction (“tax shelter”). Participants indicated whether they would recommend the tax shelter and answered questions regarding the transaction and their corporate tax compliance views.

Hierarchical Regression results indicate that, in the corporate tax compliance context, decision makers’ norms (moral/social factors) moderate the effect of perceived expected value of aggressive tax transactions (economic factors). More specifically, results indicate that (1) perceived legality of aggressive corporate tax transactions significantly impacts willingness of corporate decision makers to recommend them, even when controlling for perceived economic effect of the transaction, and (2) due to moral/social factors, corporate decision makers often may not support aggressive tax treatments with material positive expected values.

Accordingly, (1) custom and social factors should be integrated into the corporate tax compliance decision-making framework, and (2) campaigns to strengthen corporate tax compliance should focus on the law’s text and intent as well as upon sanctions for noncompliance.

This chapter presents a new model for developing and assessing the decision competencies of executive decision-makers. Prior models consider individual and group decision-making but neglect to consider the impact of group-interactive decision-making on real-world problem-solving and sense-making activities. In the present study experimental protocols represent an approximation of a realistic business decision-making process, where decision-makers consult with groups of stakeholders and then make decisions on their own. The model juxtaposes decision competence with the level of decision confidence with which decisions are made. The study furnishes an objective test for this phenomenon, resulting in quantitative empirical evidence of either follow-the-herd (FTH) behavior, or group-forged individual decisions (GFID), or follow-my-own-mind (FMOM) individual decision behavior. The study investigates the impact of group-interactive decision processes on hubristic behavior – decision-makers who make poor/wrong decisions, but remain confident in their choices, judgments, and decisions. The resulting management decision competency model provides an inter-disciplinary matrix, of benefit to human resource development specialists, and provides scholars in organizational behavior and leadership development with guidance for current and future research into group dynamics and decision competencies.

Distributed performance arrangements are increasingly used by organizations to structure dyadic and team interactions. Unfortunately, distributed teams are no panacea. This chapter reviews some of the advantages and disadvantages associated with the geographical and temporal distribution of team members. An extended discussion of the implications of distributed team performance for individual, team, and organizational decision making is provided, with particular attention paid to selected cultural factors. Best practices and key points are advanced for those stakeholders charged with offsetting the performance decrements in decision making that can result from distribution and culture.

We extend the classical garbage can model to examine how individual differences in ability and motivation will influence organizational performance. We find that spontaneous coordination provided by an organized anarchy is superior when agents are equally competent. The Weberian bureaucracy of planned coordination is effective when problems require specialist knowledge. However, errors in matching problems to specialized agents are a central challenge for bureaucracies. Actual organizations, therefore, combine elements of organized anarchies and bureaucracies. Heterogeneous motivation compounds coordination problems, but is usually less important than competence. Our findings point to matching and interactive learning as fruitful areas for further study.