Public Management Decision Making: Effects of Decision Content

One obvious aspect of public management decisions and decision making has largely escaped attention-decision content. We examine the effects of decision content by asking the following questions for budget cutback and information technology decisions: How does content affect the time required for decision making? How does content affect who participates? How does content affect the decision criteria employed? How does content affect the information quality used in the decision-making process and red tape? The results suggest that information technology and budget cutback decisions differ in important ways. For information technology decisions, cost-effectiveness is not a significant criterion, average decision time is much longer, and decisions are generally viewed as permanent and stable. For cutback decisions, cost-effectiveness is a significant criterion, decisions. are made much more quickly, and they are viewed as unstable and changeable. Surprisingly, decision content does not appear to affect the number of participants.

[1]  R R McDaniel,et al.  Physician participation in hospital strategic decision making: the effect of hospital strategy and decision content. , 1991, Health services research.

[2]  Glenn D. Paige,et al.  The Korean Decision. , 1968 .

[3]  Barry Bozeman,et al.  A Theory Of Government “Red Tape” , 1993 .

[4]  Paul C. Nutt,et al.  Public-Private Differences and the Assessment of Alternatives for Decision Making , 1999 .

[5]  C. Lindblom.  THE SCIENCE OF MUDDLING THROUGH , 1959 .

[6]  Amy L. Pablo,et al.  Reconceptualizing the Determinants of Risk Behavior , 1992 .

[7]  G. Kingsley.  Decision participation in public and private organizations , 1997 .

[8]  Dianna L. Newman,et al.  Evaluator Credibility as a Function of Report Style , 1978 .

[9]  G. Allison,et al.  Essence of Decision , 1971 .

[10]  Barry Bozeman,et al.  Decision Making in Public and Private Organizations: A Test of Alternative Concepts of "Publicness" , 1990 .

[11]  Richard L. Daft,et al.  Organization Theory and Design , 1983 .

[12]  Liam Fahey,et al.  The Micro-Politics of Strategy Formulation1 , 1982 .

[13]  Reid Hastie,et al.  Content Effects on Decision Making. , 2001, Organizational behavior and human decision processes.

[14]  Marshall W. Meyer,et al.  Power in Organizations. , 1982 .

[15]  Burton M. Sapin,et al.  Foreign policy decision-making (revisited) , 2002 .

[16]  Barry Bozeman,et al.  Bureaucracy and Red Tape , 1999 .

[17]  J. Dutton.  PATTERNS OF INTEREST AROUND ISSUES: THE ROLE OF UNCERTAINTY AND FEASIBILITY , 1988 .

[18]  W. Dutton,et al.  The Interests Served B Y Technological Reform , 1979 .

[19]  Charles H. Levine.  Organizational Decline and Cutback Management. , 1978 .

[20]  G Gigerenzer,et al.  Reasoning the fast and frugal way: models of bounded rationality. , 1996, Psychological review.

[21]  Joanna L. Y. Ho,et al.  Decision problem structuring: generating options , 1988, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern..

[22]  S. Pandey.  Managerial perceptions of red tape , 1995 .

[23]  Sanjay K. Pandey,et al.  The Impact of Red Tape's Administrative Delay on Public Organizations' Interest in New Information Technologies , 1997 .

[24]  Sanjay K. Pandey,et al.  Examining Red Tape in Public and Private Organizations: Alternative Explanations from a Social Psychological Model , 2000 .

[25]  J. Webster,et al.  RESEARCH NOTES. PATTERNS OF INTEREST AROUND ISSUES: THE ROLE OF UNCERTAINTY AND FEASIBILITY. , 1988 .

[26]  B. Tabachnick,et al.  Using Multivariate Statistics , 1983 .

[27]  B. Bozeman,et al.  Red Tape and Task Delays in Public and Private Organizations , 1992 .

[28]  C. Wise,et al.  Balancing Accountability and Risk in Program Implementation: The Case of National Fire Policy , 2002 .

[29]  E. Weber,et al.  Content and Discontent: Indications and Implications of Domain Specificity in Preferential Decision Making , 1995 .

[30]  Barry Bozeman,et al.  Bureaucratic Red Tape and Formalization: Untangling Conceptual Knots , 1996 .

[31]  S. Sitkin,et al.  Determinants of Risky Decision-Making Behavior: A Test of the Mediating Role of Risk Perceptions and Propensity , 1995 .

[32]  G. Kingsley,et al.  Decision Process Models and Organizational Context: Level and Sector Make a Difference , 1991 .

[33]  Edward McAuley,et al.  Measuring Causal Attributions: The Revised Causal Dimension Scale (CDSII) , 1992 .

[34]  David C. Wilson,et al.  Top Decisions: Strategic Decision-Making in Organizations. , 1987 .

[35]  James D. Thompson.  Organizations in Action , 1967 .

[36]  Sanjay K. Pandey,et al.  Red Tape: A Review and Assessment of Concepts and Measures , 2002 .