Decision-Making Processes in the Workplace

Evidence of the predictive validity has showed that lower decision-competence is related to greater risk-taking and potentially maladaptive behaviors. If decision-making competence reflects the tendency to approach decisions from a perspective that stresses quality of the decision process rather than solely focusing on immediate outcomes, one might expect that greater decision-making competence also will be associated with lower incidence of behaviors that may bear adverse long-term consequences. For instance, being reflective and gathering enough information before making decisions, relying on sense of self-determination when critically evaluating options and being mindful in relation to choice consequences, all these skills should be able to address toward long-term outcomes. Such components have been selected by Miller and Byrnes as fundaments of the DMCy conceptualization which relies on the "self-regulation model of decision-making" in which a self-regulated decision maker is an individual who sets adaptive targets and takes proper measures to achieve such tasks.

In complex environments such as organizations, a competent decision-maker requires a variety of cognitive skills to continuously search for information to improve work performance. This process involves developing, comparing, and mastering choices while at the same time dealing with cognitive limitations, heuristics and biases and individual inclinations that can impair the accomplishment of task targets. In this sense, a higher level of DMCy could represent an explicative antecedent of task accomplishment at work. This is in accordance with the self-regulation theory, where people cannot successfully adapt to the work environment until they develop a sense of control over behavioral processes. These adjustments stimulate the development of strategies to overpower decision-making deficiencies given by harsh work conditions.