Management and ethical decision-making

Every human activity has its characteristic features, the general tendencies that are often difficult to perceive for those engaged in the activity. Such general tendencies are of special concern to those managing in such activities, whether one is coaching soccer or running a corporation, for only with knowledge of such tendencies can one engage in intelligent managing and, more important, intelligent moral action. For the activity of business is not value-neutral, and if one is to manage morally in business, one must come to understand its general tendencies insofar as they affect values. Wade L. Robison is Associate Professor at Kalamazoo College, Department of Philosophy. He was formerly Assistant Professor at Ohio State University and Instructor at the University of Wisconsin. He has been Ford Area Foundation Fellow and NEH Fellow. He has been Editor of three books, Profits and Professions: Essays in Business and Professional Ethics (with J. Ellin and M. Pritichard), Medical Responsibility: Autonomy, Informed Consent, and Euthanasia (with M. Pritchard), and McGill Hume Studies (with N. Capaldi and D. Norton); author of eight articles on David Hume, including David Hume: Naturalist and Meta-sceptic, in Hume: A Re-evaluation, ed. J. King and D. Livingston and Hume's Sceptisism, Dialogue (Spring 1973).Paper presented at the 16th Conference on Value Inquiry, entitled: Ethics and the Market Place: An Exercise in Bridge-Building or On the Slopes of the Interface.     

Electronic decision-making for developing countries

Political, economic and social development requires "good governance" and intelligent decision-making. Development decision centers (DDC) equipped with appropriate information technology (IT) can help to improve development decisions, increase effectiveness and efficiency of public and private administration and support democratization and political stability.DDC provide IT-based facilities for brainstorming, discussion, organization and evaluation of ideas, objectives, strategies, projects, etc. They can be integrated into community information centers or established within government agencies, business corporations, universities and other institutions of higher learning to offer assistance in solving complex development problems that require close collaboration of decision-makers and experts.The paper analyzes political, socio-cultural and economic development problems, and suggests to use appropriate IT and group support systems as an innovative strategy to overcome such problems. It demonstrates the proposed approach by presenting typical steps and results of development planning in a DDC, the author has built up at the University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. This center is believed to be the first in Africa and may be considered as a prototype of a DDC which could become a standard facility in community information centers to help integrate improve effectiveness, efficiency, transparency and accountability of development decision-making.     

Forced compliance in family decision-making

‘Forced compliance,’ a situation in which a person engages in a behavior that he or she would normally deem as inappropriate, is used in this study to examine conflict resolution in family decision-making. Specific hypotheses related to a major purchase decision are tested in a field study. The results indicate that those husbands or wives who have been forced to engage in counterattitudinal behaviors find numerous ways to justify their inconsistencies.     

Behavioral models of managerial decision-making

This paper reviews the literature that applies behavioral economic models to managerial decisions. It organizes the literature into research that focuses on alternative utility functions and research that focuses on non-equilibrium models. Generally, behavioral models have seen less application to manager decisions than to consumer decisions and therefore there are many opportunities to develop new theoretical models, new laboratory experiments, and new field applications. The application of these models to field data is particularly underdeveloped.     

谈林业发展决策的探讨

县区是我国发展林业的重要区域.面对十七犬后新的林业发展契机.从下述三个方面,概要分析县区规划林业创新性的发展思路:1.紧密结合县区实际,深化林业改革创新;2咖强森林资源培育基地建设,加快森林资源培育总量;3.实施林业再加工项目带动,壮大林产工业,对县区规划林业创新性的发展.     

Multinational decision-making: Reconciling international norms

How should highly-placed multinational managers, typically schooled in home country moral traditions, reconcile conflicts between those traditions and ones of the host country? When host country standards for pollution, discrimination, and salary schedules appear substandard from the perspective of the home country, should the manager take the high road and implement home country standards? Or does the high road imply a failure to respect cultural diversity and national integrity? In this paper, I construct and defend an ethical algorithm for multinational managers to use in reconciling such international normative conflicts.     

Factors influencing big data decision-making quality

Organizations are looking for ways to harness the power of big data (BD) to improve their decision making. Despite its significance the effects of BD on decision-making quality has been given scant attention in the literature. In this paper factors influencing decision-making based on BD are identified using a case study. BD is collected from different sources that have various data qualities and are processed by various organizational entities resulting in the creation of a big data chain. The veracity (manipulation, noise), variety (heterogeneity of data) and velocity (constantly changing data sources) amplified by the size of big data calls for relational and contractual governance mechanisms to ensure BD quality and being able to contextualize data. The case study reveals that taking advantage of big data is an evolutionary process in which the gradually understanding of the potential of big data and the routinization of processes plays a crucial role.     

Online reviews as a pacifying decision-making assistant

Drawing on uses and gratification theory, this article elucidates how consumers capitalize on online reviews for purchase decisions in three markets (Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam). Three studies demonstrate this objective. Study 1 considers online reviews as a one-dimensional construct consisting of three behavioral components, including textual comments, contextual images, and star ratings, that had been validated by using reliability and validity analyses. Study 2 employs an ANOVA to analyze how these components relate to different consumer groups in terms of gender, age, and location. Study 3 explores the mediating role of online trust in the online reviews and purchase decision relationship under the moderating effect of the perceived effectiveness of social media platforms. Using a cross-national survey and a two-stage partial least squares analysis, the authors substantiate the proposed relationships and discuss the theoretical and managerial contributions of this research.     

Navigating imposed innovation: A decision-making framework

Modern economies are characterized by the rising role of nonmarket actors (e.g., regulatory agencies, social activists, labor unions, media) that are gaining influence over the behavior of for-profit firms. These nonmarket stakeholders use their clout over industry players to impose innovations that require costly changes in business practices or technological trajectories while lacking firm-level economic justification. How should a company respond when it is pressured to adopt a new practice or change its products, while the economic calculations suggest that this is going to be a pure cost? Our study suggests alternative strategic responses to imposed innovation pressures and explores the factors determining the choice of an optimal strategy. Grounding the argument on the outside-in approach to pursuing imposed innovations, we propose a framework of organizational responses to external pressures to innovate, with varying degrees of firm engagement and different levels of cooperation with other industry actors. We also present a decision tree approach, allowing organizational decision makers to analyze the contextual determinants and ultimately arrive at the most appropriate, context-determined strategy.     

A model of decision-making incorporating ethical values

A model is presented which describes the process decision-makers follow when faced with problems containing ethical dimensions. The model, based upon the empirical literature, is designed to provide guidance to researchers studying ethical behavior in business. The model portrays the decision-maker with a set of personal values which are mediated by elements of the organization's culture. The combination of personal values and organizational influences yields decisions which may be significantly different from those made based upon personal values alone. Inclusion of the personal values of the decision-maker as the dominant individual input and an explicit discussion of the ethical decision process make this model more comprehensive than other recent ethics models. David J. Fritzsche is Visiting Professor in the Department of Managing and Organization at the University of Washington. His articles have appeared in numerous journals and books. He is also a co-author of the Business Policy Game, a strategic management simulation.     

Cultural effects in East Asian strategic decision-making

This article asks whether Asian businesses take strategic decisions in distinctively Asian ways. It develops hypotheses about Asian decisionmaking from a consideration of theoretical cultural dimensions and empirical data in the literature. Contrary to expectations, an analysis of data from a survey of top Asian managers indicates that East Asian managers take decisions in a more rational manner relative to their Western counterparts. A distinction between social and cognitive dimensions of decision-making processes is suggested to explain some of these findings. Important unresolved questions are raised about the interpretation of cultural dimensions and about potential biases in empirical reports of East Asian decision-making characteristics. Implications for cultural differences research are discussed.     

Family decision-making theory: An overview and assessment

Because the majority of the American population presently lives within family structures, this area is one of vital concern to marketers. The purpose of this article is to review the present state of research in family decision making and to provide suggestions for future research. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The ethical decision-making processes of information systems workers

An empirical investigation was conducted to determine whether management information systems (MIS) majors, on average, exhibit ethical decision-making processes that differ from students in other functional business areas. The research also examined whether the existence of a computer-based information system in an ethical dilemma influences ethical desision-making processes. Although student subjects were used, the research instrument has been highly correlated with educational levels attained by adult subjects in similar studies. Thus, we feel that our results have a high likelihood of generalization to the MIS professional community. The results indicate that MIS majors exhibit more socially-oriented ethical decision-making processes than non-MIS majors measured by the Defining Issues Test. The results also indicate that the existence of a computer-based information system in an ethical dilemma may influence ethical decision-making processes. The study makes no statement regarding MIS majors making more (or less) ethical decisions. The business ethics literature is reviewed, details of the study are presented, implications for management are considered, and directions for future research are suggested.David Paradice is Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems in the Department of Business Analysis and Research at Texas A&M University. His research interests focus on the utilization of artificial intelligence in managerial information systems and the influence of those systems on managerial decision-making behavior. His research has been presented at international conferences and has been published in several academic journals. He is co-editing a book of readings in the information systems/ethics area.Roy Dejoie is a doctoral student in the Department of Business Analysis and Research at Texas A&M University. His primary research activities investigate the influence of information systems on ethical decision-making behavior. He is also co-editing a book of readings in the information systems/ethics area.     

Consumer information-seeking behaviour in the travel decision-making process

One popular tourism promotional medium available to tourism destination marketing organizations is destination-specific travel information packages made available to potential visitors upon request. This paper discusses the importance of the tourist-directed information package as a promotional tool. The findings of this study indicate significant differences between information-seeking tourists and non-information-seeking tourists with regard to their socio-economic and vacation travel characteristics.     

Integrating intuition and artificial intelligence in organizational decision-making

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally changing organizational decision-making processes. With the abilities to self-learn and to improve decision quality, AI is now taking over many decision responsibilities that were formerly assigned to humans alone. However, the effectiveness of AI for ill-structured and uncertain decision environments is still in question. In such decision contexts that have no precedent on which to base a solution, humans have historically relied on their intuition to make decisions. Yet intuition, too, has been found to have weaknesses that restrict decision quality. Therefore, this article introduces a decision-making model that effectively integrates the strengths of both intuition and AI while minimizing the vulnerabilities of each method. The model specifies when and how both modes should be combined for effective organizational decision-making. In addition, the article presents important future research considerations relating to AI for both practitioners and academics.     

An empirical investigation into international entry mode decision-making effectiveness

This study examines the effect of decision rationality and hierarchical centralization on international entry mode decision-making effectiveness (DME). The role of environmental uncertainty is additionally explored as a moderating variable in this investigation. Drawing from the strategic decision-making process perspective, this research is seemingly the first to include behavioral processes in explaining how effective the decision associated with adopting an international entry mode is. Based on a study of 233 internationalized Chinese private firms, the evidence suggests that decision rationality positively influences DME, while hierarchical centralization negatively affects DME. The moderating effects of environmental uncertainty are negative for both decision rationality and hierarchical centralization.