Making Management Decisions: the Role of Intuition and Emotion

The work of a manager includes making decisions (or participating in their making), communicating them to others, and monitoring how they are carried out. Managers must know a great deal about the industry and social environment in which they work and the decision-making process itself to make decisions well. Over the past 40 years, the technique of decision making has been greatly advanced by the development of a wide range of tools-in particular, the tools of operations research and management science, and the technology of expert systems. But these advances have not applied to the entire domain of decision making. They have had their greatest impact on decision making that is well-structured, deliberative, and quantitative; they have had less impact on decision making that is loosely structured, intuitive, and qualitative; and they have had the least impact on face-to-face interactions between a manager and his or her coworkers-the give and take of everyday work. In this article, I will discuss these two relatively neglected types of decision making: "intuitive" decision making and decision making that involves interpersonal interaction. What, if anything, do we know about how judgmental and intuitive processes work and how they can be made to work better? And why do managers often fail to do what they know they should do-even what they have decided to do? What can be done to bring action into closer accord with intention? My article will therefore have the form of a diptych, with one half devoted to each of these topics. First, I will discuss judgmental and intuitive decision making; then I will turn to the subject of the manager's behavior and the influence of emotions on that behavior. Sometimes the term rational (or logical) is applied to decision making that is consciously analytic, the term nonrational to decision making that is intuitive and judgmental, and the term irrational to decision making and behavior that responds to the emotions or that deviates from action chosen "rationally." We will be concerned, then, with the nonrational and the irrational components of managerial decision making and behavior. Our task, you might say, is to discover the reason that underlies unreason. Intuition and Judgment