Decision Making: The Vroom-Yetton-Jago Models

Leadership and decision making are typically treated as different processes in management textbooks. Leadership is linked with topics such as teams, influence, and motivation—issues of great relevance to social and organizational psychology. Decision making is linked with topics such as risk, uncertainty, information processing, and heuristics (learning)—issues integral to management science and cognitive psychology.

Leadership and decision making merge when one begins to focus on a particular aspect of leadership style: participation in decision making. Participation refers to the opportunity that a leader affords team members to influence decision. Autocratic leadership provides no opportunity for such influence. Democratic or participative leadership provide high levels of team influence. Empirical work on autocratic and participative leadership styles has an interesting beginning. After escaping from Nazi Germany just prior to World War II, the German psychologist Kurt Lewin sought to study the effects of autocratic and democratic leadership styles in the laboratory. Largely due to Lewin's influence, participation in decision making became an important explanatory variable not just among Lewin's many disciples but also among social scientists interested in the management of large-scale organizations (e.g., Maier, Likert, Hersey, and Blanchard; Tannenbaum and Schmidt).

Most of these management theorists were strong advocates of participative decision making, based largely on its superior motivational properties. However, reviews of the evidence concerning its effects on performance were mixed, casting doubt on the generality of these effects. In 1969, writing in a chapter for the Handbook of Social Psychology, Victor Vroom, then professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, concluded that “The critics and proponents of participative management would do well to direct their efforts toward identifying the properties of situations in which different decision-making approaches are effective rather than toward wholesale condemnation or deification of one approach” (Vroom 1969, 40).