Decision's familiarity and strategic decision-making process output: the mediating impact of rationality of the decision-making process

Many managerial researches in the past several decades, especially in the early 1980s, have investigated and written about managerial strategic decision-making from a variety of dimensions and perspectives (e.g., Simon, 1965; Mintzberg et al., 1976; Weihrich and Koontz, 1993; Amason, 1996; Thompson and Strickland, 2003; Gamble and Thompson, 2009). In spite of this ongoing attention, the subject of strategic decision-making is still in a contradictory and controversial phase with theoretical dilemmas. Thus, a need remains for the development and testing of hypotheses relating the nature of the strategic decision-making process to contextual factors. The goal was to extend prior work on factors influencing the strategic decision-making process, and investigate the possible relationship between a decision’s familiarity and quality of the decision process output while rationality of the decision-making process mediates their relationship. Results based on a field study of 151 managers from 42 manufacturing firms indicate that the extent of rationality in the strategic decision-making process positively mediates the relationship between decision familiarity and decision process output.