Abstract
Decision-making is a multidisciplinary and ubiquitous phenomenon in organizations, and it can be observed at the individual, group, and organizational levels. Decision making plays, however, an increasingly important role for the manager, whose cognitive competence is reflected in his ability to identify potential opportunities, to immediately detect and solve the problems he faces, and to predict and prevent future threats. Nevertheless, to what extent do managers of the most diverse sectors and industries continue to rely on false knowledge when they have better strategies at their disposal? The present article proposes, through the application of bibliographically based instruments, the diagnosis of three prominent biases – overconfidence, optimism, and anchoring effect – in managers of the Portuguese port sector, as well as also seeking to establish a comparative analysis with the conclusions already documented in relation to the Brazilian civil construction sector. In addition, and in view of the results obtained, this paper also provides a set of measures capable of contributing to the mitigation of the effects of these and other biases, and, in this way, to the improvement of the decisions of said managers.
Highlights
Herbert Simon (1997) was one of the first authors to recognize that while the homos economicus intends to deal with the real world in all its complexity, the manager recognizes that the perceived world is nothing more than a drastically simplified model of the confusion and complication that surround us
Results obtained by performing a Wilcoxon Test for the equality of two means (Z = –6.079 and Sig = 0.000) allow us to conclude that the equality hypothesis between the means of the variables and is rejected at a confidence interval of 99%1, and that values associated to the variable are significantly higher than the values associated with the variable, which attests to the existence of overconfidence in the managers of the sample
It should be noted that there is a slight difference between the average values of correct answers recorded, which is lower in the sample of managers in the Portuguese port sector (5.99 compared to the 6.43 score in the Brazilian construction sector), with similar averages of confidence levels (8.09 and 8.08, respectively)
Summary
Herbert Simon (1997) was one of the first authors to recognize that while the homos economicus intends to deal with the real world in all its complexity, the manager recognizes that the perceived world is nothing more than a drastically simplified model of the confusion and complication that surround us. This notion implies that managers, when making decisions, apply basic principles that do not occupy them much time for reflection. The nature of the use of heuristics – predominantly unconscious and intuitive – can prompt them to make considerable and predictable errors of judgment called biases
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