The Importance of Context: The Ethical Work Climate Construct and Models of Ethical Decision Making -- An Agenda for Research

This paper examines the role which organizational context factors play in individual ethical decision making. Two general propositions are set forth, examining the linkage between ethical work climate and decision making. An agenda for research and the potential implications of the study and practice of managerial ethics are then discussed.     

多元化战略管理:决策程序及其理论依据

通过对多元化战略的理论回顾,总结多元化战略管理研究的理论流派,多元化战略管理理论对中国企业进行多元化决策的指导意义,并创造性地提出了多元化战略管理决策程序及其理论依据,试图初步建立起多元化理论与企业实践操作间联系的纽带。     

Chief executive officers' dispositional optimism,host country's rule of law,and foreign market equity mode choice of Ghanaian small and medium‐sized enterprises

Despite a growing interest in the influence of managerial characteristics on firms' strategic decision‐making process, scholarly knowledge is limited with regard to how and when psychological attributes of executives affect firms' foreign entry mode decision. Building on behavioral decision‐making theory, we address this gap by investigating the effect of chief executive officers' (CEOs') optimism on firms' foreign market equity mode choice. In addition, we examine the moderating influence of the host country's rule of law on this relationship. Using primary data from 227 small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ghana, we found that increases in the levels of CEOs' optimism are related to the increases in preference for equity entry mode. This relationship is amplified when CEOs perceive the host country to have stronger rule of law. The findings have theoretical, managerial, and policy implications for SMEs' foreign market entry mode strategy.     

High Stakes Decision Making: Normative,Descriptive and Prescriptive Considerations

This paper reviews the state of the art of research on individual decision-making in high-stakes, low-probability settings. A central theme is that resolving high-stakes decisions optimally poses a formidable challenge not only to naïve decision makers, but also to users of more sophisticated tools, such as decision analysis. Such decisions are difficult to make because precise information about probabilities is not available, and the dynamics of the decision are complex. When faced with such problems, naïve decision-makers fall prey to a wide range of potentially harmful biases, such as failing to recognize a high-stakes problem, ignoring the information about probabilities that does exist, and responding to complexity by accepting the status quo. A proposed agenda for future research focuses on how the process and outcomes of high-stakes decision making might be improved.     

The Impact of Online and Offline Information Sources on Automobile Choice Behavior

The Internet has significantly impacted the information search behavior of consumers. Many consumers regularly consult Internet sources for information on product categories, brands, manufacturers, and retailers, particularly when making a purchase decision about major durable goods. Automobiles are one example of such goods. The Internet has become a major source for information on automobile brands, attributes, and dealers. While much research has been done on the impact of the Internet on automobile information search behavior and search costs, there is limited work on the relationship between Internet use and the ultimate automobile choice. This type of relationship may have interesting managerial implications for both manufacturers of automobiles and firms that provide information on automobiles. This paper attempts to address this gap. It examines whether Internet use is associated with different choice patterns for automobiles. Using discrete choice analysis on automobile choice data, we explore whether there will be differences in the salience of specific information types for online versus offline consumers. We find that Internet users rely more on ratings while non-Internet users rely more on recommendations when making automobile choices. Our findings have several useful managerial implications for information provision, both online and offline.     

Dynamic Influences on Individual Choice Behavior

Research examining the process of individual decision making over time isbriefly reviewed. We focus on two major areas of work in choice dynamics:research that has examined how current choices are influenced by the historyof previous choices, and newer work examining how choices may be made toexploit expectations about options available in the future. A central themeof the survey is that if a general understanding of choice dynamics is toemerge, it will come through the development of boundedly-rational models ofdynamic problem solving that lie on the interface between economics andpsychology.     

Consumer strategic decision making and choice process: prefabricated house purchase

This study examines the consumer choice process in case of strategic purchases, such as house buying. In view of the existing literature exploring consumer decision making and choice for strategically important products, the purpose of this research is twofold: (a) to develop a conceptual model of strategic decision making; and (b) to empirically explore this model with regard to prefabricated house purchases. The results of our qualitative research suggest that in addition to the idiosyncratic characteristics of the customer, his or her personal situation, environmental factors, the role of feelings, experience, subconscious factors, needs, and goals should to be taken into account to better understand strategic consumer decision making and their choice process when buying a house.     

Is Decision Style Related to Moral Development Among Managers in the U.S.?

The decision making process is an important aspect of the managerial function that is becoming increasingly complex due to technological and global impacts. It is essential, therefore, to understand why various managers approach the decision making process differently. One area that is related to how managers perceive and process the information that is associated with decision making, is that of decision style.It is not enough, however, to explore decision style in isolation, as some of the decisions that managers make often entail ethical components concerning the ability to balance the interests of diverse groups. Moral reasoning is therefore important for every manager, and could impact the decision style that is employed by such managers. The relationship between managerial decision style and moral development is one that could provide unique insights into the area of decision making, yet it is an area that has remained relatively unexplored.Using Alan Rowe's Decision Style Inventory (DSI), in conjunction with James Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT), the purpose of this study was to ascertain the relationship between decision style and moral development among U.S. managers.The findings of this study of 270 managers suggest that there is a relationship between higher directive decision style scores and lower principled reasoning scores. Since the focus of individuals who demonstrate a directive decision style is on task completion, perhaps the consideration of the many alternatives that are necessary to reason at a more ethically attuned level is neglected. Managers who exhibit a directive decision style might be responsible for the management of non-managerial populations of workers, and in such a capacity, set the ethical tones and examples for employees to follow. Since training and educational interventions in the area of ethics have been shown to increase moral development scores, those managers who are identified as displaying a directive decision style might benefit from such training.     

The Limits of Strategic Rationality: Ethics, Enterprise Risk Management, and Governance

This article explores the links between strategic goals, enterprise risk management, and ethics. We offer a typology of managerial attitudes toward strategic goals and rationality and explore the interaction between strategic and ethical decision making. In so doing, we offer a practical framework for managers to approach ethical dilemmas in the highly complex, volatile, and risky economy that we currently find ourselves in.     

管理者声誉对决策质量影响作用的实证研究

管理者的声誉在战略决策过程中的作用如何?本文研究管理者的声誉与公司决策质量的关系,研究结果显示,声誉与决策质量之间存在显著的正相关关系,并且决策承诺在声誉和决策质量的关系中起中介作用。因此,中国企业决策制定的过程中,不能仅仅关注反映决策质量的简单财务指标,更要关注决策者对决策的承诺,加强决策者对决策实施的承诺有助于提高最终的决策质量。     

Decision making under conditions of conflict

A real-world application is employed to explain three general types of decision situations that can arise under conditions of conflict. In addition, meaningful connections and relationships among these areas of decision making are clearly pointed out. To permit useful decision technologies to be employed by practitioners for better understanding and for resolving a variety of actual decision problems, a range of flexible decision support systems is discussed. Subsequently, interesting research developments contained in the upcoming sequence of 12 articles on decision making under conflict are summarized and compared. The research articles not only present unique approaches to decision making involving multiple participants, each of whom may have multiple objectives, but suggest a variety of challenging research problems to be investigated in the future.     

Cognitive hurdles in the use of decision support systems to enhance problem understanding

Computer-assisted decision support systems have been widely promoted as a means of enhancing problem understanding in crisis and noncrisis decision making. Clinical observation of actual applications of a particular category of software for interactive decisions (CONAN, DECISIONMAKER) have identified cognitive hurdles in the use of such systems. These hurdles not only pose a challenge to the development of such normative interventions in the decision process, but also an opportunity for furthering the shift to a new psychologically informed paradigm for decision making.     

Experiments on strategic choices and markets

Much of experimental research in marketing has focused on individual choices. Yet in many contexts, the outcomes of one’s choices depend on the choices of others. Furthermore, the results obtained in individual decision making context may not be applicable to these strategic choices. In this paper, we discuss three avenues for further advancing our understanding of strategic choices. First, there is a need to develop theories about how people learn to play strategic games. Second, there is an opportunity to enrich standard economic models of strategic behavior by allowing for different types of bounded rationality and by relaxing assumptions about utility formulation. These new models can help us to more accurately predict strategic choices. Finally, future research can improve marketing practice by designing better mechanisms and validating them using experiments.     

Organisational context and behavioural problems as determinants of the effectiveness of the strategic marketing planning process

This paper continues the authors’ recent work on organisational behaviour by arguing that the differences between theory and parctice in marketing planning can be better understood by analysing the corporate environment for marketing management. Thus, variables such as organisational structure, the configuration of corporate decision making processes, patterns of managerial behaviour and the impact of corporate culture, can help us to understand how marketing planning processes operate in practice.

The authors contention is that the real problems associated with the strategic marketing planning process should be grounded in the realities perceived by executives. They go on to discuss a number of common pitfalls in the planning process before reporting on an exploratory empirical study of UK firms with over 100 employees. The implication of the results is seen as reselling the management agenda with regard to the process of marketing planning.     

The impact of ethical concerns on family consumer decision‐making

Ethical consumerism and family consumer decision‐making, including the influence of children in this area, are spheres of consumer behaviour in which a substantial amount of academic research has already been undertaken. However, the crossover of these two areas is as yet under‐researched, as well as the level of pester power parents are subjected to from children aged 3 and under. This paper uses qualitative methods to investigate the issues surrounding the ethical consumer decision‐making process with families who have children aged 3 years old or under. This research found that the motivation to pursue an ethical lifestyle varied across the sample, but the emergence of an ‘inheritance factor’, where parents are awakened to ethical issues because of the birth of their child, was prominent. Other issues that transpired from this research include the prominence of ethical trade‐offs in consumer decision‐making, ethical choices as normalizing behaviour and finally the presence of pester power in the ethical context. Ethical consumerism strongly emerged as an integral part of the parent's identity construction, especially for the mothers as they struggled to adapt to their new roles. Further research delving into the role ethical choices have on identity construction and the parental response to pester power would be a valuable addition to the overall context of this research.     

基于企业战略目标的项目选择指标体系研究

确定备选项目的优先顺序,从中选择最优项目或最优项目组合是企业投资决策中的难题.文章构建出基于企业战略目标的项目选择指标体系,同时运用层次分析法确定出符合企业战略目标的项目优先顺序.实际应用结果表明,该指标体系在项目选择上能够与企业战略目标最佳吻合.     

Buyer-supplier relational characteristics and joint decision making

This paper explores propositions dealing with the influence of buyer-supplier relational characteristics on their joint decision making. Specifically, the proposed conceptual framework focuses on the link between three relational constructs (trust, commitment, relationship maturity) and two types of joint decision making (strategic and tactical). Strategic decisions are those that “expand the pie” for both parties (integrative decisions), and tactical decisions are those that “divide the pie” between the two parties (distributive decisions). We propose that the effect of relational characteristics on joint decision making is likely to be moderated by the characteristics of the supplier organization (such as team orientation) and its environment (such as competitive intensity). We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications and possible extensions of the theoretical model.     

The Norm Theory of Capital Structure: International Evidence*

Akerlof proposes that the norms of decision makers can bridge the gap between New Classical economic theories and conflicting empirical evidence. We apply his framework to cross‐country capital structure decision making and propose a norm theory of capital structure. Consistent with its predictions, we find that two principal components that represent the manager–subordinate relationship and the manager–environment relationship in a national culture are significantly and negatively related to the median leverage ratio at the country level. This study is among the first to provide a direct link between national culture and capital structure as made operational through managerial norms.