Essentials of Organizational Behavior, 14/e

Influences on Decision Making: Individual Differences and Organizational Constraints

We turn here to factors that influence the way people make decisions and the degree to which they are susceptible to errors and biases. We discuss individual differences and then organizational constraints.

Individual Differences

As we discussed, decision making in practice is characterized by bounded rationality, common biases and errors, and the use of intuition. Individual differences such as personality also create deviations from the rational model.

Personality

Specific facets of conscientiousness—particularly achievement striving and dutifulness—may affect escalation of commitment.51 First, achievement-oriented people hate to fail, so they escalate their ...