Search results

Research shows that teams often fail to surface and use unique information to evaluate decision alternatives. Under a condition known as the hidden profile, each member uniquely possesses a critical clue needed to uncover the superior solution. Failure to share and adequately evaluate this information will result in poor decision quality. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of the devil's advocacy technique on the decision quality of hidden profile teams.

In order to mitigate this team decision‐making bias, the present study utilizes experimental research to examine the impact of the devil's advocacy technique on the decision quality of hidden profile teams.

Results show that devil's advocacy groups achieved higher decision quality than groups under free discussion. However, devil's advocacy teams also had higher levels of affective conflict. As a result, while they selected the best solution, devil's advocacy introduced conditions that may hinder the solution's implementation

Similar experiments with advocacy techniques suggest that the positive effect on decision quality found here may be reduced in the presence of stronger hidden profiles.

While the devil's advocacy technique has the potential to uncover hidden profiles and improve group decision making, the paper recommends that managers use this technique only in teams with strong critical thinking norms that foster constructive conflict.

To the authors' knowledge, no study has examined the impact of devil's advocacy in groups where information is not shared equally prior to deliberations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how legitimizers invest in their approach to meet the suspicion of being a one‐sided advocate.

A multiple case study of four public sector decisions, based on a comparative argumentation analysis of two consulting reports in each case, one written by a legitimizer and one by a devil's advocate. The findings of the document analysis are triangulated with author interviews.

Consultants acting as legitimizers are often suspected of being political allies of a decision maker. To neutralize their reputation as hired guns, these consultants invest in being seen as impartial by making their research approaches transparent and their argumentation balanced to increase their credibility in the eyes of stakeholders, which is necessary to execute their central task: legitimizing a major decision.

The number of four cases could limit the possible variation within the legitimizer role. Further research could therefore explore under what conditions consultants are willing to argue more one‐sidedly as “advocates”.

Practitioners, such as consultants or decision makers, can apply the approach used in this research to make their method more transparent and to balance their argumentation to get commitment from stakeholders, while legitimizing a decision.

The paper nuances the view on the legitimizer role of consultants in previous studies, by exploring how their arguments are more balanced and transparent than assumed and how they try to contribute to their clients' decision‐making process.

Research relying on laboratory protocol and case studies has demonstrated positive effects from cognitive conflict and controversy. Reported benefits have included better judgments, improved strategic decisions and a better understanding of others' positions. This study develops and assesses the psychometric properties of an instrument designed to examine decision conflict in field settings. This instrument was administered on site to 63 managers. Factors identified in the instrument were disagreement, openness, and control. Interestingly, the openness dimension was positively associated with job commitment. The control factor was inversely associated with job satisfaction.

Professional organizations are encouraging accounting educators to better prepare their students for their professional careers by improving students’ interpersonal skills. Although accounting instructors are responding by including group activities in their courses, they may not be considering the negative impact of the phenomenon known as “groupthink” on the outcome of group problem solving. Our search of the Social Science Citation Index (2007) provides evidence that groupthink continues to be an area of research interest in academic disciplines other than accounting. Our search provides no evidence that accounting educators are acknowledging or addressing the potential influences the groupthink dynamic may have on students working in groups. The dynamics involved with groupthink have the potential to affect the quality of decisions made by accounting students in their classroom assignments as well as in their future professional lives. We describe the dynamics leading to groupthink, provide examples from our own experience, and offer accounting educators guidelines to discourage the impact of groupthink on the process of student work groups.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the worldwide discussion of conceptualization, multiple functions and management of national education in an era of globalisation by proposing a new comprehensive framework for research, policy analysis and practical implementation.

Based on a review of the diversity in definitions of national education, the controversies in policy and implementation of national education are discussed. The different interpretations of national education stem from different assumptions and perspectives. Each of them seems too confining in globalisation. To overcome the controversies, this paper calls for a re-conceptualisation of national education from a broader perspective.

The conceptualisation of broad-based national education is premised on two fundamental principles. First, national education which is meant for development is a process by which humankind moves forward at multiple levels including the personal, local, national and global levels. Second, national education nowadays must be understood against a globalised context, in which there are multiple, complex and dynamic developments at play including technological, economic, social, political, cultural and learning developments of not only individuals and local communities within the nation but also the global world beyond the nation. In brief, broad-based education serves multiple functions at multiple levels. With national identity understood in a broader perspective, the multiplicity and complexity of national education may be better addressed. Identifying with one’s own nation is a dynamic and complicated process in which interaction and integration between the different levels and different functions of civic identities are involved. The approaches to management, implementation and pedagogy of broad-based national education are also discussed.

The new framework of conceptualisation and the comparison between the characteristic profiles of broad-based and narrow-based national education provide new implications and possibilities not only for policy and implementation but also for research involving multiple functions and multiple levels.

The new perspectives associated with the broad-based national education will contribute to future research worldwide in this area.

The appropriate use of decision strategies can be of marked benefit to effective decision making. The challenge of decision making under uncertain conditions and the absolute necessity of decision aids for the practising manager at nearly any level of the organisation are examined. Specific strategies are developed for making effective decisions based on the amount of information available and the degree of environmental uncertainty and a framework for selecting the correct strategy put forward, since these strategies are only appropriate given certain conditions.

The authors perform a large‐scale review of debiasing literature with the purpose of deriving a mutually exclusive and exhaustive debiasing taxonomy. This taxonomy is used to conceptualize debiasing activities in the supplier selection process. For each supplier selection‐debiasing construct, scale items are proposed.

A systematic classification approach was used to build a debiasing taxonomy, combined with a Q‐methodology.

Based on the developed and externally validated debiasing taxonomy, five debiasing activities for the supplier selection context are derived. The conceptual investigation of these supplier selection‐oriented debiasing measures helps both researchers and supply managers to gain a better understanding of debiasing mechanisms and to effectively further improve the supplier selection process by integrating behavioral aspects.

This research extends the taxonomy of decision biases developed by Carter, Kaufmann, and Michel, by systematically analyzing strategies to debias the decision‐making process. The highly fragmented research landscape on debiasing was inventoried and structured. As a result, a debiasing taxonomy was created that extracted five main debiasing categories. These were then conceptualized within the context of the supplier selection process. In doing so, debiasing literature from different research streams such as economics, psychology, and behavioral and strategic decision making was systematically integrated into the field of supply management. Proposed scale items allow for empirical investigation as a next step in the development of the nascent field of behavioral supply management.

Decision-making in human resources management is done at both the micro and macro level of organizations. Unfortunately, the decisions at each level are often executed without consideration of the other, and current theory reflects this issue. In response to a call for integration of micro- and macro-level processes by Huselid and Becker (2011), we review the extant literature on strategic human resources and high-performance work systems to provide recommendations for both research and practice. We aimed to contribute to the literature by proposing the incorporation of the situation awareness literature into the high-performance work systems framework to encourage the alignment of human resources efforts. In addition, we provide practical recommendations for integrating situation awareness and strategic decision-making. We discuss a process for the employment of situation awareness in organizations that might not only streamline human resources management but also result in more effective decisions. Additional considerations include implications for teams, boundary conditions (e.g., individual differences), and measurement.