In today's competitive environment, managers are continuously faced with the need to take decisions. Decision-making is often portrayed as being based on rigorous analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the decision alternatives in a specific situation. However, managers do not always take decisions in isolation. Rather, decisions are embedded in a social and organisational environment that serves as frame of references for decision-making. Norms and behaviours of others in this environment play an important role in decision making. In addition, decisions are the result of social processes in today's organisations. Being embedded in social environments, the outcomes of decisions taken in organisations are characterised by systematic similarities that can be interpreted as patterns of decisions. Robert Urlichs provides an empirical examination of these patterns of decisions in organisations and interprets them on the basis of the theoretical and empirical literature on the decision-making behaviour of individuals and organisations. In particular, he differentiates the classical from the behavioural decision-making literature. Whereas the classical perspective is based on the assumptions of perfect rationality, the behavioural perspective replaces these assumptions with the notion of bounded rationality. The author provides an extensive review of the biases and heuristics, and their impact on the outcomes of decisions. He concentrates on the outcomes of decisions and on their interrelations. In contrast, the existing literature on decision-making behaviour focuses largely on the process of individual decisions.
Although decision-making is widely regarded as being based on rigour analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the decision alternatives in a specific situation, managers do not always take decisions in isolation. Rather, they are embedded in a social and organisational environment, which serves as orientation for decision-making. Being embedded in social environments, the outcomes of decisions taken in organisations are characterised by systematic similarities that can be interpreted as patterns of decisions.
Based on publicly available data on the outcomes of resource allocation decisions of the two pharmaceutical and chemical companies Ciba and Sandoz, Robert Urlichs investigates more than 1,000 decisions. He analyses this data base in a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques and identifies patterns of decision outcomes. The results reveal that patterns of decision outcomes develop within and even across organisations. Organisational decision-making seems to be biased by the outcomes of prior decisions taken in the same and in other organisational units. An excursus shows that many of the identified patterns of decisions can be interpreted as realised strategies, which have emergent and deliberate elements. Therefore, the author brings life to Mintzberg's notion of realised strategy as a pattern in a stream of decisions, providing an empirical basis and analytical methodology.
