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Researchers and practitioners have traditionally maintained that organizational buying requires rational decision-making. However, individuals at organizations make decisions daily applying a confluence of rationalizations and emotions. This study aims to address the roles of personal feelings, facts and emotional advertising content in the organizational decision-making process.

In two studies, the authors apply both qualitative and quantitative methods to explore emotional and cognitive reactions to advertising. In Study 1, depth interviews were conducted with marketing and advertising content developers from a Fortune 100 technology company. In Study 2, a web-based survey was sent out to a Fortune 100 company’s buyer panel.

Results suggest that advertising using emotion-based themes helps to foster brand engagement tendencies and advocacy for a brand. Findings also demonstrate that organizational status (C-level executive’s vs non-C-level employees) moderates the relationship between buyers’ reliance on facts and their receptivity to advertising using emotion-based themes, such that reliance on facts increases the appeal of emotional advertising.

This research contributes to the organizational buying literature by addressing the dearth of research on the role of emotions in organizational decision-making and providing insight into the role of advertising in business-to-business (B2B) decision-making.

These results imply that advertising incorporating emotion-based themes provide meaningful information to B2B buyers and is especially effective when targeted at buyers at higher levels in an organization.

B2B buying behavior has traditionally been considered a rational undertaking. This research explores how decision-making orientation and the presence of advertising using emotion-based themes help to foster engagement and advocacy for the brand.

The purpose of this research is to show that new conceptual work in the judgment and decision‐making research arena has suggested a nonconsequentialist perspective to decision‐making. The current study successfully tested and found support for a decision‐making model, which serves an alternative to expected utility theory.

Using a natural decision‐making setting, 578 participants completed a one time study using questionnaires attempting to test a nonconsequentialist decision‐making model, which includes indecisiveness as a vital construct.

Full mediation was found for the Nonconsequentialist Decision‐Making Model (NDMM), allowing us to discuss directionality and causality. Further, 81 percent of the 578 participants felt indecisive about their personal decision, highlighting the importance of examining this understudied construct. Research limitations/implications – The current study suggests that individuals facing a difficult decision would soon rather make a detrimental decision than stay in the decision‐making process. This means that the actual act of making a decision functions as a coping behavior in and of itself.

Understanding the decision‐making process is complex, and many individual and environmental variables play critical roles that lead the decision maker to a particular choice. Traditionally, the judgment and decision‐making literature has interpreted decision‐making as rational or irrational, with an attempt to understand and negate common flaws in logic. However, this study supports a nonconsequentialist perspective, suggesting that emotions play a significant role in the decision‐making process. By such an inclusion we can move beyond the sole focus of rational‐irrational and move toward a consequentialist‐nonconsequentialist paradigm in decision‐making. By making this shift, we are better able to deal with and understand individual emotions during the decision‐making process, and ultimately help individuals functionally cope and stay in the process, rather than escape and make a poorly thought through decision. This work is especially critical in the upper echelons of organizations, where nonconsequentialist dysfunctional decisions can affect millions of lives and cost billions of dollars.

Nonconsequentialist dysfunctional decisional coping behavior is a recently developed topic with significant conceptual work but insufficient empirical evidence. Loewenstein et al. (2001, p. 267) note that: “Virtually all current theories in decision‐making under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist”. If Loewenstein et al.'s (2001) quote is accurate, then the current study offers empirical support for an alternative, nonconsequentialist model.

This paper aims to call attention to the relative neglect in strategic decision‐making research to include a sense dimension, proposing a broadened conceptualization of strategic decision making that accounts for the processes through which managers generate sense when exposed to turbulence in their environments.

Based on scholarly writing and empirical‐oriented examples, the paper illustrates how managers cope with unusual and unexpected situations, and discusses fruitful directions for future research.

When faced with turbulence, managers generate and communicate sense through believing in and arguing for a certain course of action, and through meeting talk and interaction that entwine with emotions. The focus on both retrospective and prospective orientation of action unfolds a sense dimension integral to which are belief and emotion.

Important questions for future research concern the role “plausibility” plays in strategic action, the relationship between retrospective and prospective orientation of action, and the information conveyed by emotions.

The paper could contribute to an increased awareness among practitioners that they can act effectively when coping with turbulence simply by making plausible sense, and encourage reconciliation between calculative rationality and emotion, in practice promoting their complementarity.

The paper affords a broadened conceptualization of strategic decision making through interrelating scholarly writing on strategic decision making, sense‐making and emotion. It also draws inspiration from Polanyi's work on tacit dimension and knowing, furthering an understanding of how retrospective and prospective orientation unfold in connection with a tacit relation, constituting a so‐called sense‐made reality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of transparency on consumers' judgment and decision-making.

This study uses an experimental research design in which participants' negative emotions dynamically change driven by group emotional interactions when they are experiencing a group complaint.

The experimental results show that compared with opaque products, transparent products make consumers rely more on emotions to make judgments and decisions (Experiment 1). It is precise because transparency increases the influence of emotion on consumers' judgment and decision-making that positive emotion makes consumers' evaluation and willingness to pay higher, while negative emotion makes consumers' evaluation and willingness to pay lower (Experiments 2 and 3). Transparency will also affect consumers' subsequent judgment and decision-making methods, so they are more inclined to choose the option with the dominant emotional dimension (Experiment 4).

Previous studies mainly focus on the impact of transparent packaging on consumers and discuss the impact of transparent packaging on consumer product evaluation and consumption quantity. This study proves that product-related transparent elements can also affect consumers' decision-making methods, making them more dependent on emotions to make decisions, enriching the research on the influencing factors of consumer decision-making methods.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) research that has a vague positioning of the bounded rationality of an actor. By borrowing insights from other disciplines, this study aims to develop the IMP approach further by acknowledging the importance of individuals who act and make decisions on behalf of their companies.

This study is conceptual. By examining the IMP studies in combination with decision-making literature from behavioral economics and psychology, this paper provides a new understanding of the phenomenon in question.

This study demonstrates that individual decision-making is not as rational as has previously been thought, thus indicating the bounded rationality of the actor. After examining the most common negative emotions that influence the decision-making process, the paper presents a research agenda. It provides a series of research topics and methodological choices for future IMP research endeavors.

As this paper is conceptual, empirical research is needed to examine the role of negative emotions in dynamic decision-making processes.

Managerial implications of this paper are focused on providing instructions for managers on how to deal with negative emotions in dynamic decision-making processes.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first papers that attempts to connect the IMP studies with the dynamics of decision-making by examining negative emotions in the business world.

Purpose – The aim of this study is to determine the impact of feeling bored on managers' decision-making in the digital age under conditions of increased uncertainty by examining the role of personality trait openness and empirically testing such relationships within the context of retail middle managers.

Design/methodology/approach – Feeling bored was defined within a broader Decision-Making Process Model, which included the personality trait openness. An empirical study with retail middle managers was conducted to examine the relationships between feeling bored and decision-making competence (DMC). Regression models were fit to test whether feeling bored affects DMC and whether the associations were moderated by personality trait openness.

Findings – In the relationship between feeling bored and DMC, the moderating role of the personality trait openness was established. Results showed that feeling bored has a significant negative association with middle managers' confidence levels and risk perceptions when making decisions. Results also provided evidence that the learning component of personality trait openness plays a moderating role in the relationship between feeling bored and DMC. Most notably, the learning component of personality trait openness neutralizes the negative effects of feeling bored on managers' ability to remain appropriately confident when making decisions. In addition, the learning and inquisitive components temper the positive association between mood excited and risk perceptions. Limitations to the study are outlined.

Practical implications – Since trait openness (specifically its learning component) benefits decision-making contexts, it makes trait openness a worthy criterion to include when screening aspirant retail middle managers. The benefits of trait openness (specifically its learning component) for middle managers and their teams (especially when they are feeling bored) are indicated, since learning neutralizes the negative effect feeling bored has on appropriate confidence levels in retail management decision-making contexts.

Purpose – Initial explorations in the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics have highlighted evidence supporting a potential dissociation between a fast automatic system and a slow deliberative controlled system. Growing research in the role of emotion in decision-making has attempted to draw parallels to the automatic system. This chapter will discuss a theoretical framework for understanding the role of emotion in decision-making and evidence supporting the underlying neural substrates.

Design/Methodology/Approach – This chapter applies a conceptual framework to understanding the role of emotion in decision-making, and emphasizes a distinction between expected and immediate emotions. Expected emotions refer to anticipated emotional states associated with a given decision that are never actually experienced. Immediate emotions, however, are experienced at the time of decision, and either can occur in response to a particular decision or merely as a result of a transitory fluctuation. This chapter will review research from the neuroeconomics literature that supports a neural dissociation between these two classes of emotion and also discuss a few interpretive caveats.

Findings – Several lines of research including regret, uncertainty, social decision-making, and moral decision-making have yielded evidence consistent with our formulization – expected and immediate emotions may invoke dissociable neural systems.

Originality/value – This chapter provides a more specific conceptualization of the mediating role of emotions in the decision-making process, which has important implications for understanding the interacting neural systems underlying the interface between emotion and cognition – a topic of immediate value to anyone investigating topics within the context of social-cognitive-affective-neuroscience.

Organizational buying behavior has often been treated as a rational activity, even though humans are involved in the decision-making. Human decision-making often includes a complex cadre of emotions and rationalizations. Subsequently, organizational buyers may not only be driven by logic, testing and facts, but also by emotions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role that emotions play in organizational buying behavior.

In-depth interviews were conducted with marketing decision-makers for one of the most valuable brands in the world. The role that emotions play in the behavior of organizational buyers is elucidated from the perspective of these marketing professionals.

Emotions are prevalent at all stages in the organizational decision-making process and various discrete emotions fuel action tendencies among buyers. Efforts are made by marketers to strategically manage the emotions buyers experience.

Although organizational buyers must see the functional value of a product or brand, companies need to consider ways in which brands can connect with buyers on an emotional and personal level.

This paper contributes to the literature by offering insights into which discrete or specific emotions are most prominent in organizational buying behavior and how the manifestation of these emotions impact decision-making at each stage in the buying cycle.

Recent years have brought significant advances in research on behavioral ethics. However, research on ethical decision making is still in a nascent stage. Our objective in this paper is twofold: First, we argue that the practice of mindfulness may have significant positive effects on ethical decision making in organizations. More specifically, we will discuss the benefits of “reperceiving” – a meta-mechanism in the practice of mindfulness for ethical decision making and we provide an overview of mindfulness research pertaining to ethical decision making. Subsequently, we explore areas in which neuroscience research may inform research on ethics in organizations. We conclude that both neuroscience and mindfulness offer considerable promise to the field of ethical decision making.

Purpose: During turbulent social and economic times, perceptions of job insecurity can be expected to increase. In this chapter, we outline a theoretical model that links perceptions of job insecurity to lower affective commitment and high work-related stress, resulting in employees' engaging in poor decision-making behavior. We argue further that employees who possess individual skills of being aware of emotions and managing emotions are less susceptible to such behavior. Study Design/Methodology/Approach: We tested our model in two studies. The first study was conducted using an online sample of 217 respondents. The second study used a split administration design conducted in a single organization and used a sample of 579 employees. Findings: Our data revealed that job insecurity is linked to negative decision-making behaviors and that better emotional awareness and management skills may reduce negative decision-making behaviors. Originality/Value: Our findings support the notion of threat rigidity theory where we found that job insecurity affects how individuals make decisions. Our analysis suggests that the individual's level of emotional skills can act as a form of behavioral control that can ameliorate the effects of job insecurity on decision-making behavior. Research Limitations: Both studies had a female gender bias in our sampling frames. There is a possibility of common method variance affecting the results of Study 1, and both studies involved the use of a self-report measure of emotional skills.