Search results

This paper focuses on individuals' improvisation in organizations. The extant literature in this area examines improvisation as either a predictor or an outcome variable. However, there is still considerable confusion about the essence of improvisation and its individual-level determinants. To address these deficiencies, we discuss the differences between improvisation, creativity, and intuition, integrating insights and theories from those fields. Then, we propose a comprehensive model describing a process that includes contextual and individual level variables, which leads to improvisation. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our model and suggest avenues for future research.

During the Greenspan‐Bernanke era, the responses of Federal Reserve officials to financial crises resulted in an extraordinary involvement of the US central bank in the non‐banking financial sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine the informal and evolving conceptual framework that allows Federal Reserve officials to pursue a strategy of “constrained discretion” in responding to financial disturbances.

Behavioural economics relies on designed psychological and economic experiments to predict behavioural biases at the group level. As an analogue applicable to understanding biases in the intuitive judgments of individual policymakers, a naïve behavioural economics approach relies on intuitive or naive psychology and the interpretation of historical events as natural experiments to explain why intuitive judgments of Federal Reserve officials will contain biases.

Under the Greenspan‐Bernanke conceptual framework, Federal Reserve officials exercise “constrained discretion” in responding to disturbances arising from macro structural changes in the financial sector. The two key concepts are the Greenspan‐Bernanke doctrine on how the Federal Reserve officials respond to financial asset price bubbles and their collapses, and Bernanke's financial accelerator. Several examples are cited in which policy errors made by Alan Greenspan were attributable to identifiable biases in his intuitive judgment. In addition, Bernanke's response to the financial crisis of 2007‐2009 was based on his interpretation of the Great Depression as a natural experiment. But that interpretation was heavily biased by the influence of Milton Friedman on Bernanke's intuitive judgment. While Federal Reserve officials will need to exercise discretionary judgment in responding to financial crises, the potential for errors due to biases in that judgment can be reduced through regulatory reforms that lessen the potential for financial crises to occur.

While quantitative analyses of the effects of the Federal Reserve's actions on non‐bank financial institutions and the financial markets are ongoing, little attention has been given to the psychological aspects of the intuitive judgment that influences the discretionary decisions of the policymakers.

An ongoing debate in the field of organizational decision-making concerns the use of intuition versus analytical rationality in decision-making. For the purpose of contributing to this debate we use a rich empirical dataset built from a longitudinal study of information technology project prioritization in a large financial institution to investigate how managers make space for the use of intuition in decision-making. Our findings show that during project prioritization meetings, senior decision makers apply three different techniques: bringing-in project intangibles, co-promoting intuitive judgments, and associating intuitive judgments with shared group context, when they make space for intuition in decision processes.

This paper aims to outline strategies for defence against social engineering that are missing in the current best practices of information technology (IT) security. Reason for the incomplete training techniques in IT security is the interdisciplinary of the field. Social engineering is focusing on exploiting human behaviour, and this is not sufficiently addressed in IT security. Instead, most defence strategies are devised by IT security experts with a background in information systems rather than human behaviour. The authors aim to outline this gap and point out strategies to fill the gaps.

The authors conducted a literature review from viewpoint IT security and viewpoint of social psychology. In addition, they mapped the results to outline gaps and analysed how these gaps could be filled using established methods from social psychology and discussed the findings.

The authors analysed gaps in social engineering defences and mapped them to underlying psychological principles of social engineering attacks, for example, social proof. Furthermore, the authors discuss which type of countermeasure proposed in social psychology should be applied to counteract which principle. The authors derived two training strategies from these results that go beyond the state-of-the-art trainings in IT security and allow security professionals to raise companies’ bars against social engineering attacks.

The training strategies outline how interdisciplinary research between computer science and social psychology can lead to a more complete defence against social engineering by providing reference points for researchers and IT security professionals with advice on how to improve training.

Positive organizational scholarship in healthcare (POSH) suggests that, to promote widespread improvement within health services, focusing on the good, the excellent, and the brilliant is as important as conventional approaches that focus on the negative, the problems, and the failures. POSH offers different opportunities to learn from and build resilient cultures of safety, innovation, and change. It is not separate from tried and tested approaches to health service improvement – but rather, it approaches this improvement differently. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

POSH, appreciative inquiry (AI) and reflective practice were used to inform an exploratory investigation of what is good, excellent, or brilliant health service management.

The researchers identified new characteristics of good healthcare and what it might take to have brilliant health service management, elucidated and refined POSH, and identified research opportunities that hold potential value for consumers, practitioners, and policymakers.

The secondary data used in this study offered limited contextual information.

This approach is a platform from which to: identify, investigate, and learn about brilliant health service management; and inform theory and practice.

POSH can help to reveal what consumers and practitioners value about health services and how they prefer to engage with these services.

Using POSH, this paper examines what consumers and practitioners value about health services; it also illustrates how brilliance can be theorized into health service management research and practice.

This review examines the role of intuition as a cognitive tool to better manage complex crises. The paper draws on a case study in the aviation industry, the Hudson river incident, to advance the potency and value of intuitive expertise in crisis situations.

Crisis managers operating in safety critical domains are often faced with difficult and exceptional conditions that may challenge their expertise and cause them to rely more heavily on their experiential knowledge. This review therefore provides insights into intuitive thinking and demonstrates its importance in crisis decision-making.

Evidence suggests that intuition arguably offers a better cognitive option to decision-makers in high staked and time-pressured crisis situations. The Hudson River case study further highlights why organizations should aim to train their personnel to become better intuitive thinkers.

This review challenges conventional classical decision theory, outlining its limitations in typical fast paced crises environments. The paper instead positions intuition as a scientific construct that holds important value for crisis managers in extreme conditions.

This paper aims to examine complex clinical decision‐making processes in trauma center units of hospitals in terms of the immediate impact of complexity on the medical team involved in the trauma event.

It is proposed to develop a model of decision‐making processes in trauma events that uses a Bayesian classifier model with convolution and deconvolution operators to study real‐time observed trauma data for the decision‐making process under tremendous stress. The objective is to explore and explain physicians' decision‐making processes under stress and time constraints during actual trauma events from the perspective of complexity.

Because physicians have blurred information and cues that are tainted by random environmental noise during injury‐related events, they must de‐blur (de‐convolute) the collected data to find a best approximation of the real data for decision‐making processes.

The data collection and analysis is innovative and the permission to access raw audio and video data from an active trauma center will differentiate this study from similar studies that rely on simulations, self report and case study approaches.

Clinical decision makers in trauma centers are placed in situations that are increasingly complex, making decision‐making and problem‐solving processes multifaceted.

The science of complex adaptive systems, together with human judgment theories, provide important concepts and tools for responding to the challenges of healthcare this century and beyond.

Hard decision analysis models allow complex decisions to be broken down into easier‐to‐handle and precisely defined sub‐problems and also provide a documented rationale for the decision. This paper aims to investigate why the course of action prescribed by a hard decision analysis model can sometimes conflict with a manager's common‐sense view of the appropriate course of action, even when the model is based on judgments elicited from the manager. It also discusses how such conflicts might be resolved so that the decision can be made with greater insight and confidence.

The paper draws on the decision making and psychology literatures to obtain a definition of common‐sense and to show how and why it might lead to conclusions that are at variance with those indicated by rational decision model.

Four possible reasons for conflicts between common‐sense and a hard decision analysis model are identified. First, common sense reasoning is fuzzy while decision analysis models are precise. Second, under some circumstances, the axioms of a decision analysis model may conflict with common sense. Third, the decision model may be a misrepresentation of the decision problem because errors may have occurred when judgments were elicited from the decision maker. Fourth, common sense may suggest an inferior course of action.

The paper shows the potential dangers of making decisions based on common‐sense alone or of relying unquestionably on a decision analysis model.

The paper shows that the exploration of conflicts between the indications of decision analysis models and common sense and may lead to better decision making.

A research line has emerged that is concerned with investigating human factors in information systems and cyber-security in organizations using various behavioural and socio-cognitive theories. This study aims to explore human and contextual factors influencing cyber security behaviour in organizations while drawing implications for cyber-security in higher education institutions.

A systematic literature review has been implemented. The reviewed studies have revealed various human and contextual factors that influence cyber-security behaviour in organizations, notably higher education institutions.

This review study offers practical implications for constructing and keeping a robust cyber-security organizational culture in higher education institutions for the sustainable development goals of cyber-security training and education.

The value of the current review arises in that it presents a comprehensive account of human factors affecting cyber-security in organizations, a topic that is rarely investigated in previous related literature. Furthermore, the current review sheds light on cyber-security in higher education from the weakest link perspective. Simultaneously, the study contributes to relevant literature by gaining insight into human factors and socio-technological controls related to cyber-security in higher education institutions.