Managers’ and Employees’ Judgment and Decision Making: New Theoretical Developments

Abstract

The quality of managers’ and employees’ decision making is one of the most important antecedents of organizations’ efficiency — if employees and managers make suboptimal decisions, their company’s performance would suffer (Ceschi, Demerouti, Sartori, & Weller, 2017; Dane & Pratt, 2007; Dean Jr & Sharfman, 1996; Schwenk, 1995). This symposium brings together groundbreaking research on judgment and decision making that advances scholarship in managerial decision making and cognition, human resources, and organizational behavior. Four presentations will illustrate how people’s judgment and decision making biases lead managers and employees to make suboptimal decisions in diverse organizational contexts, such as overtime work, bonus allocation, job selection, and pay disparity. Further, the research discussed in this symposium not only highlights how decision making biases lead people to make irrational decisions, but also identifies interventions to rectify people’s biases, thereby making the current findings useful to both management researchers and practitioners. Inverse Demand Curves in the Workplace: Asking Employees to Work Longer When They are Unproductive Presenter: Siran Zhan; U. of New South Wales Presenter: Krishna Savani; Nanyang Technological U. Equity Bias in Bonus Allocation to Teams: Giving Too Much to Larger but Unproductive Teams Presenter: Yun Bai; Xi'an Jiaotong U. Presenter: Krishna Savani; Nanyang Technological U. Should You Join a Large Team or a Small Team? Role of Employee Qualifications on Team Selection Presenter: Zhiyu Feng; Nanyang Technological U. Presenter: Krishna Savani; Nanyang Technological U. Does the Cause of Inequality Influence Perceptions of Fairness? Presenter: Simone Tang; Cornell U. Presenter: Kin Fai Ellick Wong; Hong Kong U. of Science and Technology