Organizational Decision Making (Cambridge Series on Judgment and 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 makers' pervasive use of heuristics of reasoning and described them as boundedly rational. These multiple perspectives may further our understanding of organizational decision making.