Search results

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.

The paper attempts to construct a novel multi-objective grey hierarchical group consensus approach to deal with the group consensus problems consisting of hierarchical relationship and non-cooperative behaviors among decision makers (DMs).

To deal with these group consensus problems consisting of hierarchical relationship and non-cooperative behaviors among DMs non-cooperative behavior in uncertain information systems, considering the influence of coordination cost and the degree of group consensus, based on the idea of grey situation decision-making, the authors establish a multi-objective grey hierarchical group consensus model, and design different invalid decision elimination rules for decision-making groups of different sizes, and use a case verifies the effectiveness and feasibility of the model.

With the continuous improvement of the coordination cost budget, the degree of consensus of all departments and the overall consensus tend to be stable, and will no longer change with the increase of the coordination cost budget. The cost required by each department is basically consistent with the response trend of the cost required to coordinate the overall situation to the pre-set lower limit of group consensus.

The proposed approach can succeed in identifying DMs' information, and mine the DMs' information and help make a relatively more scientific decision.

Introduction The management of a business enterprise invariably requires meetings and group deliberations ranging from board meetings to first line supervisor meetings throughout the financial year. For the effective use of such group decision‐making situations, management must go beyond the assumptions and rational decision models of accountants and economists. While rationality, decision process steps, programmable decisions and statistical approaches can be most usefully considered, also important are the role of personal values in the decision‐making process, occupational identification, bias in thinking, rationalisation instead of rationality, the role of independent critical thinking, the problems of “group think”, lateral versus vertical thinking and the required conditions for group creativity.

This study explores the effects of different structures of accountability on the development of groupthink. Specifically, the differences between individual and collective accountability are examined and contrasted to a condition with no accountability. The groupthink phenomenon can be differentiated into collective avoidance, arising from a pessimistic perception of a decisional issue, and collective overoptimism. It is argued that structures of accountability can either promote or reduce groupthink, depending upon the way group members perceive the decisional issue. We tested the hypothesis that accountability can prevent the collective‐avoidance type of groupthink, and that individual accountability will be more effective in doing so than collective accountability, by preventing the possibility to “hide in the crowd.” The results confirm that under conditions conducive to collective avoidance, individual accountability is more effective in reducing groupthink‐like tendencies than collective accountability. However, group members expecting to be collectively responsible still display less symptoms of groupthink than control groups. In particular, accountability makes groups display more difficulty to reach consensus, stimulates group members to try to influence the decision making, results in a more equal dispersion of influence within the group, and in less risky decisions. Some methodological concerns regarding research on groupthink and accountability, and the implications of the findings for future research in this area are discussed.

The paper introduces a new model, the evolutionary-existential model of organizational decision-making. The purpose of the model is to provide an empirical framework for understanding the context for decision-making under conditions of existential threat to organizations, such as the global COVID-19 pandemic during the year 2020.

The model is built on an extensive interdisciplinary literature review, drawing from research in social psychology, management, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology and consumer behavior. In general, the authors follow Bargal's (2006) call for action research in the spirit of Lewin (1951).

According to the model, organizational decision-making during the pandemic threat is influenced by (1) existential threat and (2) an unprecedented macroenvironmental context for decision-making. The authors argue that these psychological and macroenvironmental forces may lead to suboptimal decision-making, based on (1) their basic cognitive architecture and (2) specific evolutionary triggers activated by the pandemic. The authors highlight how the interaction between these inputs and the decision context manifest in various social psychological phenomena that are known to impact judgments and decisions.

Simply put, the magnitude and the urgency of the global pandemic call for new and integrative ways of understanding organizational decision-making.

The model is new. Although the authors draw on prior research and theory, the model is uniquely interdisciplinary; further, the authors are able to make specific and unique predictions about the inputs, decision context and their social–psychological consequences for decision-making.

Involving subordinates in decisions may improve the quality and acceptance of decisions when participation fits the constraints of the situation. A theory of participative decision making (PDM) is developed that suggests under what conditions subordinates should be involved in decision making. The model describes not only when teachers should be involved but also the appropriate role for the administrator, which depends on the decisional situation. The analysis concludes with three specific school applications.

Most decision-making problems in construction are complex and difficult to solve, as they involve multiple criteria and multiple decision makers in addition to subjective uncertainties, imprecisions and vagueness surrounding the decision-making process. In many instances, the decision-making process is based on linguistic terms rather than numerical values. Hence, structured fuzzy consensus-reaching processes and fuzzy aggregation methods are instrumental in multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problems for capturing the point of view of a group of experts. This chapter outlines different fuzzy consensus-reaching processes and fuzzy aggregation methods. It presents the background of the basic theory and formulation of these processes and methods, as well as numerical examples that illustrate their theory and formulation. Application areas of fuzzy consensus reaching and fuzzy aggregation in the construction domain are identified, and an overview of previously developed frameworks for fuzzy consensus reaching and fuzzy aggregation is provided. Finally, areas for future work are presented that highlight emerging trends and the imminent needs of fuzzy consensus reaching and fuzzy aggregation in the construction domain.

Two studies in the context of English‐French relations in Québec suggest that individuals who strongly identify with a group derive the individual‐level costs and benefits that drive expectancy‐value processes (rational decision‐making) from group‐level costs and benefits. In Study 1, high identifiers linked group‐ and individual‐level outcomes of conflict choices whereas low identifiers did not. Group‐level expectancy‐value processes, in Study 2, mediated the relationship between social identity and perceptions that collective action benefits the individual actor and between social identity and intentions to act. These findings suggest the rational underpinnings of identity‐driven political behavior, a relationship sometimes obscured in intergroup theory that focuses on cognitive processes of self‐stereotyping. But the results also challenge the view that individuals' cost‐benefit analyses are independent of identity processes. The findings suggest the importance of modeling the relationship of group and individual levels of expectancy‐value processes as both hierarchical and contingent on social identity processes.

As teamwork becomes more prevalent in organizational decision-making, the influence of emotional intelligence (EI) on team decision-making process demands more research attention. This study aims to investigate the impact of EI on team psychological safety and decision-making performance.

Team decision-making performance and decision quality from a team decision task were obtained from 54 decision-making teams composed of 241 undergraduate business students from a Mid-Atlantic university. Regression analyses were used to test individual and team’s EI relationship with team decision performance and the mediation effect of psychological safety.

This study provides empirical evidence that individual EI is positively related to individual influence on team decisions. Team-level EI improves team decision-making performance through increases in psychological safety.

The sample size is relatively small, and the participants were business students; therefore, the research results may lack generalizability. Future research is encouraged to explore this topic further.

As teamwork becomes more prevalent in organizational decision-making, the influence of EI on team decision-making process demands more research and managerial attention. The findings of this paper provide insights on the importance of individual/team EI and psychological safety in team decision performance.

This study furthers research showing that emotions are pertinent to social interactions, including group decision-making, and therefore suggests the desirability of investigating other social processes affecting group decision-making.

The aggregation of information from a group of decision experts for developing collective opinion is the important question in practice. The purpose of this paper is to provide a group decision-making method via ordered weighted aggregation (OWA) operator and grey incidence analysis.

In this study, OWA operator provides aggregation of attribute values to form an overall decision for each decision expert, and grey incidence model provides aggregation of decision experts’ evaluations to form overall score for each alternative. The example illustrates the procedure and practicability of the proposed model.

A new thought for multiple attribute group decision-making problems is given. The proposed method produces an overall desirability score for each alternative.

This is to obtain a more comprehensive and realistic solution to the given group decision-making problem. The proposed analysis method of group decision-making problems reveals vitality of grey systems theory.

This paper combines OWA operator and grey incidence analysis to obtain a novel and effective method for group decision making. It is suitable for group decision-making problems in which the attribute weights are completely unknown, expert weights are completely unknown.