Organizational Decision Making

Explores decision making in organizations, highlighting the roles of incentive, conflict, power and politics.

Decision making in organizations is often pictured as a coherent and rational process in which alternative interests and perspectives are considered in an orderly manner until the optimal alternative is selected. Yet, as many members of organizations have discovered from their own experience, real decision processes in organizations only seldom fit such a description. This book brings together researchers who focus on cognitive aspects of decision processes, on the one hand, and those who study organizational aspects such as conflict, incentives, power, and ambiguity, on the other. It draws from the tradition of Herbert Simon, who studied organizational decision making's pervasive use of bounded rationality and heuristics of reasoning. These multiple perspectives may further our understanding of organizational decision making. Organizational Decision Making is particularly well suited for students and faculties of business, psychology, and public administration.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Introduction Zur Shapira; 2. Understanding how decisions happen in organizations James March; Part II. Information Processing and Attention Allocation: 3. Trying to help S & L's: how organizations with good intentions jointly enacted disaster William H. Starbuck and P. Nayaran Pant; 4. Organizational choice under ambiguity: decision making in the chemical industry following Bhopal Howard Kunreuther and Jacqueline Meszaros; 5. Strategic agenda building in organizations Jane Dutton; Part III. Preference Processing: 6. The social ideologies of power in organizational decisions Gerald Robert Salancik and Margaret Cooper Brindle; 7. Managerial incentives in organizations: economic, political and symbolic perspectives Edward J. Zajac and James D. Westphal; 8. Coordination in organizations: a game-theoretic perspective Colin Camerer and Marc Knez; Part IV. Decision Processes: 9. The escalation of commitment: an update and appraisal Barry M. Staw; 10. The possibility of distributed decision making Baruch Fischhoff and Stephen Johnson; 11. Aligning the residuals: risk, return, responsibility and authority Raghu Garud and Zur Shapira; 12. Organizational decision making as rule following Xueguang Zhou; Part V. Alternative Approaches: 13. Naturalistic decision making and the new organizational context Terry Connolly and Ken Koput; 14. Telling decisions: the role of narrative in organizational decision making Ellen O'Connor; 15. Bounded rationality, indeterminacy, and the managerial theory of the firm Roy Radner; 16. The scarecrow's search: a cognitive psychologist's perspective on organizational decision making John W. Payne.

This book offers a more realistic account of decision making in organizations by highlighting several aspects such as the salience of incentives, the pervasiveness of conflict, and the role that power and politics play in organizational decision making.