Contextualized behavior for improving managerial and entrepreneurial decision-making

Abstract

Since the conceptualization of bounded rationality by Herbert Simon (1947), management scholars started investigating how people—managers and entrepreneurs—really make decisions within (and for) organizations. Taking into considerations the effect on organizational choices (e.g., new product development, market entry, merger and/or acquisition of other entities) and related performance (in organizational, economic, and social terms), a series of trends have flourished within this pivotal research area. Nowadays, the main important are: the biasing or beneficial role of heuristics (i.e., cognitive shortcuts of human mind) (Kahneman 2003), the influence of socio-demographic characteristics and personality traits (see the derived Upper Echelons Theory; Hambrick and Mason 1984; Abatecola and Cristofaro 2020), the impact of affective states (e.g., emotions, mood, temperament), the intertwinement between cognitive and emotional factors, the co-determinant role of the (micro-, meso-, and macro-) environment in the formation of choices with person-, group-, firm-specific variables, and the biasing or beneficial impact of technologies on managers’ and entrepreneurs’ rationality.