| The Impact of Functional Issue Classification on Managerial Decision Processes: A Study in the Telecommunications Industry |
| | Bayster, Philip Gerald | Bell Communications Research | pbayster@notes.cc.bellcore.com | (513)-697-7400 |
| | Ford, Cameron M. | U. of Central Florida | Cameron.ford@bus.ucf.edu | (407)-823-3700 |
| | Functional distinctions are a pervasive aspect of organizational environments. This study describes how managers' sensemaking processes lead them to classify issues, at least in part, by their functional content (e.g. marketing, finance, etc.). It then describes a field study in the telecommunications industry which examines how labeling issues as "Marketing", "Financial", and "Human Resource" respectively ampact managerial decision making. Results show that these functional classifications evoke different ratioanl and political behavior during managers' decision making process. |
| | Keywords: Decision Making; Functional Classification |
| The Influence of Occupational Experience on the Comprehensiveness of Strategic Decision Making |
| | Steensma, Kevin H. | Pennsylvania State U., U. Park | KSteensma@psu.edu | 814-865-0385 |
| | Liberti, Theodore L. | Pennsylvania State U., U. Park | Liberti@psu.edu | 814-234-8333 |
| | We consider the influence that occupational experience has on comprehensiveness when making strategic decisions.
We define comprehensiveness to be the number of information cues that are integrated in a decision model. Theory suggests
that increased diversity in occupational experience across executive careers will enhance the size of decision models used in
strategic decision making. In addition, we draw on vocational personality literature to hypothesize that those executives that
have pursued careers within the technical realm (e.g., engineering, R&D) will be more comprehensive in their decision-making
than their counterparts that have pursued managerial tracks (e.g., marketing, finance etc.). From a sample of 87 top-level
executives that had completed a policy capturing exercise, we find no relationship between the level of diversity in occupational
experience and decision-making comprehensiveness. We do, however, find a positive relationship between the pursuit of
a predominately technical career and comprehensiveness. Implications of these findings are discussed. |
| | Keywords: Strategic decision making; vocational experience; comprehensiveness |
| The Role of Managerial Charactheristics in Strategic Issue Diagnosis: A Study of the Influence of Cognitive and Demographic Factors on Managers' Threat and Opportunity Interpretation, Causal Understanding and Data Search |
| | Kuvaas, Bård | Norwegian School of Management | bard.kuvaas@bi.no | (+47) 6755-7000 |
| | Kaufmann, Geir | Norwegian School of Management | geir.kaufmann@bi.no | (+47) 6755-7000 |
| | Previous studies report no independent effects of managerial characteristics on strategic issue diagnosis (SID). We argue that these studies suffer from limitations in the measurement of individual characteristics of managers due to their heavy reliance on demographic indicators. Our research, based on data from 161 top management team members in the newspaper industry, shows that structural cognitive characteristics of the manager added significantly to the variance in SID explained by contextual and demographic variables. Specifically, the influence of cognitive as well as demographic factors varied for different types of SID. Relatively more complex diagnosis in the forms of causal understanding and data search were much better predicted by managerial characteristics than simpler diagnosis in terms of categorization of threat and opportunity. We conclude that the advantage of direct psychological measures of the individual manager's characteristics lies in adding strength and theoretical meaningfulness to observed empirical relationships with SID. |
| | Keywords: managerial sensemaking; information processing modes; strategic choice |