How Experts Make Decisions: Beyond the JDM Paradigm

It is encouraging to hear the call put forward by Dalal et al. (2010) for a greater emphasis on decision making in the industrial–organizational psychology and organizational behavior (IOOB) community. The authors have clearly identified a large opportunity for researchers and practitioners alike to benefit greatly. However, there are reasons that traditional judgment and decision-making (JDM) research has received limited applied success in organizations to date. In this article, we outline some of those issues and discuss how a parallel perspective investigating expert decision making—the naturalistic decision making (NDM) paradigm—may be able to contribute to a stronger JDM discipline and a broader IOOB perspective on understanding and improving decision-making performance in organizations. To that end, we address four primary objectives. First, we detail some of the obstacles to translating much of the traditional JDM literature into organizations as well as how an emphasis on expert decision making can overcome these obstacles.