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.
Reviews for Organizational Decision Making
[A] terrific book... It contains the seeds for numerous dissertations- questions begging to be examined more closely. Whether you simply want to understand current thought about organizational decision making or are looking for promising research opportunities, this book is the place to look. American Journal of Psychology Organizational Decision Making is a superb collection, perhaps the best [of its kind] to date...highly relevant to both business and law. Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago An excellent reflection of the field, containing many novel and compelling insights. I encourage all scholars of decision making to read the book and to engage in the debate about the nature and future of the field. Administative Science Quarterly For any scholars who are interested in the process of decision making within organizations, Organizational Decision Making is required reading, for it covers the breadth of the field extremely well. Contemporary Psychology Succeeds in offering the reader a varied perspective of organizational decision making...Should be well received in the fields of business and the behavioral sciences...Not only explains what research on organizational decision making can do now but also what it offers for the future. Applied Cognitive Psychology
