A Decision Perspective on Organizations: Social Cognition, Behavioural Decision Theory and the Psychological Links to Micro- and Macro-Organizational Behaviour

A Decision Perspective on Organizations: Social Cognition, Behavioural Decision Theory and the Psychological Links to Micro- and Macro-Organizational Behaviour

Over the last two decades, the study of organizational behaviour (OB) has witnessed a dramatic shift away from a variety of traditional topics and toward a more cognitive and social-cognitive perspective. This change in perspective has influenced both research and application in the field, and, more recently, has redefined topics typically viewed under the heading of OB. Over the years, OB, particularly that segment of OB that is based on the study of the individual, has been chastised for lacking a central set of theories, for offering limited theoretical development of the theories it imports from psychology, and for covering topics that lack connection to issues of interest to practitioners (O'Reilly 1991). One remedy for these problems has been to expand the boundaries of the field to include the study of psychological issues that are relevant to understanding behaviour in organizations. Incorporating the lens of social cognitive psychology and theories of behavioural decision theory has, in the last two decades, dramatically expanded the perspectives available to OB scholars, and revitalized the field of OB.

In the 1988 Annual Review of Psychology, Ilgen and Klein wrote about what Markus and Zajonc (1985) term ‘a shift of near revolutionary proportions in the behaviour sciences: the cognitive perspective’. Ilgen and Klein documented the ways in which many traditional topics in OB were being influenced by this cognitive revolution. While their review is important, we believe that the cognitive revolution and, subsequent, evolution of the social cognitive perspectives has created even more dramatic changes in OB by specifically incorporating the decision making process as a primary focus of research. The journal Organizational Behaviour and Human Performance reflected this evolution by changing its name to Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, emphasizing the increasing importance of decision behaviour to the study of OB. Indicative of the change taking place in the field, decision processes emerged as a mainstream topic within OB, with researchers focusing on how decisions influence managerial behaviour (Gioia and Sims, 1986; Bazerman 2001). In addition, negotiations emerged as a central topic of OB, and have been dominated by a cognitive orientation (Neale and Bazerman 1991; Bazerman et al. 2000). As evidence of these changes, negotiation has become the most commonly published topic in Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, and both decision processes and negotiation have been institutionalized as part of the field by the creation of new divisions within the Academy of Management that specifically address these topics.

We believe that these developments reflect the tension between research and practice in business and management schools for research that provides managers with more levers for change. The structure of the situation is often given. Characteristics of the parties involved are not readily changeable. However, organizational members can have significant influence in their environment and on their organizations through their decisions. Thus, from this perspective, the traditional debates between situationists and personalogists (Davis-Blake and Pfeffer 1989; Staw et al. 1986) have obfuscated more important determinants of behaviour in organizations - the decisions and the cognitive processing that leads to these decisions - by organizational members.

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