Organizational Decision Making

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.

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.