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The purpose of this paper is to examine the capital investment process, guided by concepts from cognitive and social psychology. The intention is to gauge the extent to which managerial judgement can be detected by applying a psychological lens to the process. Initial fieldwork is subsequently reported on the extent to which managerial judgement is managed. Discovery of variations suggest an alternative perspective on understanding capital investment decisions (CIDs) that may be potentially worthwhile in understanding the long‐term success and survival of modern commercial enterprises.

Following a systematic review, employing the psychological concepts of heuristics, framing and concensus to prior case and fieldwork studies, the CID process in three companies engaged in new market/site development projects is reported. The participants initially responded to a survey and subsequently agreed to be interviewed about their processes and involvement.

The psychological concepts provided a satisfactory gauge of managerial judgement. The fieldwork revealed variety in the management of the CID process and the influence of managerial judgement.

There is an increasing call to examine the CID by case or fieldwork but, to date, the role managerial judgement plays has not been directly addressed. Applying psychological concepts to the CID process offers an opportunity to focus enquiries and improve understanding of corporate practices.

The relative reliance companies place on heuristics, framing and consensus within their specific organizational contexts ultimately may provide insights to the long‐term survival of companies.

The paper provides useful information on the cognitive and social psychology in the capital investment process.

This chapter reviews key research on the similarities and differences in leadership and management across different regions of the world. It also looks at similarities and differences on other relevant aspects, that is, commitment, work values, personality and emotional intelligence. Research has tended to focus on drawing out the differences as that appears to be worthy of news and attracts interest. We also report on the types of errors in research which might actually make real differences appear much larger. The reality is that what we find is a great deal of similarity in leadership and management behaviour across the different regions of the world. Given these similarities, can we develop a management level Situational Judgment Test (SJT) that can be used effectively across different world regions? We believe this can be achieved by identifying SJT items that work consistently across world regions and then assembling a bias-free test with robust psychometric properties.

There is a great divide between the degree to which academic research accounts for the role of managerial discretion in firm performance and the weight given by the popular press and financial community to the importance of the management of an organization. The purpose of this paper is to bridge this gap by quantifying the way managerial beliefs influence the quality of firm performance in a turbulent environment based on e‐business.

An e‐business research setting is used that is associated with a situation of environmental turbulence to allow for sufficient variance in managerial beliefs to measure their effect on firm performance. The sample contains 293 firms.

Aggregate level results indicate that managerial beliefs have a positive and significant effect on firm performance. Four distinctive segments were also found to exist. These segments vary in terms of the strength of the position that a manager holds regarding the value of e‐business and firm performance.

The paper shows that the affect of e‐business on firm performance is not structural in the sense that firm performance does not depend on the firm or industry but is reflective of the strength of the beliefs held by managers. This implies that the “black box” approach that is characteristic of much management research may be problematic because it fails to measure the variables that may matter most to performance.

Conceptualizes the impact of information technology on marketing decision making. Argues that developments in information technology affect the performance of marketing decision‐makers through different routes. Advances in information technology enhance the possibilities of collecting data and of generating information for supporting marketing decision making. Potentially, this will have a positive impact on decision‐making performance. Managerial expertise will favor the transformation of data into market insights. However, as the cognitive capabilities of marketing managers are limited, increasing amounts of data may also increase the complexity of the decision‐making context. In turn, increased complexity enhances the probability of biased decision processes, thereby negatively affecting decision‐making performance. Marketing management support systems, also being the result of advances in information technology, are tools that can help marketers to benefit from the data explosion. The analysis leads to the expectation that the combination of marketing data, managerial judgment, and marketing management support systems will be a powerful factor for improving marketing management.

Focuses on the work of managers in new forms of organisations which are flexible, horizontally integrated, and decentralised. Although much has been written about managers, including their roles, functions, and skills, the organisational context is changing, and new perspectives are needed. A process perspective is a way of understanding the work of managers in these contexts. The paper suggests two pivotal management processes, the exercise of judgment and the use of influence, through which managers add value to more general organisational processes. Some directions for research are suggested and a classroom exercise for introducing graduate students to this topic area is outlined.

Mergers and acquisitions strategies are not risk-free, potential problems in achieving success include integration difficulties, inadequate evaluation of target, inability to achieve synergy, and complexity. Such strategies can fail for many reasons including inadequate evaluation of targets or inadequate pre-decision control mechanisms. Mergers and acquisitions are reviewed in this chapter as strategic investment decision-making perspective. Established financial analyses remain important in appraising investment choices, despite their limiting assumptions and their recognised shortcomings in capturing strategic project dimensions. However, managers balance these economic analyses with less-structured, strategic analyses underpinned by informed judgement. The fact that empirical studies reveal a continued reliance on judgement by investment decision-makers does not mean that rational economic analysis is a futile exercise. What studies of practice do seem to suggest is that the theory and practice of strategic investment decision-making need to take into account both economically rational and intuitive decision processes. Reflecting on the research evidence, we conclude that strategic investment appraisal will be best supported by approaches that (i) couple sound economic analysis with the development of managerial judgement and (ii) take account of the broader decision-making context within which both economic and strategic analyses are used.

Stakeholder theory understands business in terms of relationships among stakeholders whose interests are mainly joint but may be occasionally conflicting. In the latter case, managers may need to make trade-offs between these interests. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of managerial decision-making about these trade-offs.

This paper draws on the ordonomic approach which sees business life to be rife with social dilemmas and locates the role of stakeholders in harnessing or resolving these dilemmas through engagement in rule-finding and rule-setting processes.

The ordonomic approach suggests that stakeholder interests trade-offs ought to be neither ignored nor avoided, but rather embraced and welcomed as an opportunity for bringing to fruition the joint interest of stakeholders in playing a better game of business. Stakeholders are shown to bear responsibility for overcoming the perceived trade-offs through the institutional management of social dilemmas.

For many stakeholder theorists, the nature of managerial decision-making about trade-offs between conflicting stakeholder interests and the nature of trade-offs themselves have been a long-standing point of contention. The paper shows that trade-offs may be useful for the value creation process and explicitly discusses managerial strategies for dealing with them.

The specific purpose of this study is to understand how firm size and public/private affiliation (employment status) affect voluntary disclosure decisions concerning quantitatively immaterial nonfinancial information. Although the prior disclosure literature is large and has considered a variety of factors including size and to a lesser degree employment status, this study offers a new perspective by considering both factors in the context of qualitative materiality.

This paper presents 136 manager participants with 24 cues representing nonfinancial, realistic business events and solicits their disclosure judgments. The cues are adapted from Pinsker et al. and contain information that does not meet widely-accepted quantitative thresholds for disclosure (e.g. 5 percent of net income), yet were identified by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as more likely to be material. This paper uses a median split of total assets and total revenues to determine “large” and “small” firms. Managers' judgments are measured in an own-firm setting (The context is their current employer, which can be public or private.).

This paper finds that disclosure is positively linked to firm size, but this paper do not find an employer status effect. Additional testing reveals that private firm managers are sensitive to SEC oversight and other external, competitive pressures, suggesting that they face mimetic pressures to behave like their public firm counterparts. In sum, their findings contribute significantly to the disclosure, strategic management, institutional theory and judgment-and-decision-making (JDM) literatures.

Although there is a vast literature on public firm managers' voluntary disclosure behavior (mostly involving large firms), there is little research regarding the voluntary disclosure behavior of small or large private firm managers involving nonfinancial information.

Strategic decisions represent the most important product of managerial endeavors; and strategic choice is the most critical variable in strategic management. This article advances a set of foundations in which the effectiveness of a total organization may be ascertained from the effectiveness of the strategic decisions made by its senior executives. A categorization of strategic decision effectiveness is presented that is derived from managerial attitudes toward a given strategic choice and the process from which it originates.

Accurate forecasting has become a challenge for companies operating in today's business environment, characterized by high uncertainty and short response times. Rapid technological innovations and e‐commerce have created an environment where historical data are often of limited value in predicting the future. In business organizations, the marketing function typically generates sales forecasts based on judgmental methods that rely heavily on subjective assessments and “soft” information, while operations rely more on quantitative data. Forecast generation rarely involves the pooling of information from these two functions. Increasingly, successful forecasting warrants the use of composite methodologies that incorporate a range of information from traditional quantitative computations usually used by operations, to marketing's judgmental assessments of markets. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for the integration of marketing's judgmental forecasts with traditional quantitative forecasting methods. Four integration methodologies are presented and evaluated relative to their appropriateness in combining forecasts within an organizational context. Our assessment considers human factors such as ownership, and the location of final forecast generation within the organization. Although each methodology has its strengths and weaknesses, not every methodology is appropriate for every organizational context.