Decision-Making Processes in the Workplace

Until now, the DMCy has been the only decision-making construct here provided to explain the mastering of self-regulation processes in setting choices and achieving targets. Explicability limits related to such a construct belong to the paradigm of decision-making research, traditionally based on laboratory studies and focused on the internal validity of such constructs. In general, these decision-making approaches adapted to workplace studies lack an adequate consideration of the work environment role, especially in relation to the effects of the last economic crisis, the business downsizing and consequently higher job demands for leftovers, increasing job insecurity and uncertain professional paths. Organizational jobs that traditionally occurred within a single context are nowadays replaced by boundaryless, self-managed individual work stories, where people are constantly asked to shift roles, enhance capabilities, and re-adapt to new work environments. About the individual, it means that new psychological issues related to uncertain professional paths give evidence of new patterns of outcomes, such as a lack of motivation at work, low job performance and more burnout incidence. On the other side, in order to cope with that, HR are introducing new organizational models and interventions to foster workplace adaptation (e.g., empowerment policies, participative decision-making, innovation workplace interventions, job crafting).

In light of these recent consequences, work environment has assumed more and more relevance as determinant of the decision processes made at work by every member of the organization. The effects of environmental factors on the decision-making processes assume particular importance in relation to the organizational aims. As seen, feedback and social rewards can positively affect employee's co-working, but the impact of these variables is intrinsically related to the sensitivity toward them. In this context, participative decision-making is a good example of how some individuals, inclined to use a collaborative work approach, can perform well in presence of a positive environment. For example, good relations with collaborators promote a participative decision-making style, which in turn can elicit prosocial behavior at work (i.e., extra-role performance. Instead, negative environmental variables, such as career breakdowns, lack of job opportunities, absence of colleague support can weaken the efficiency of decision-making processes by impacting the self-regulatory mechanisms that regulate enthusiasm and accomplishment satisfaction. In such settings, self-regulatory mechanisms may be hindered by the lack of such resources, resulting in lower performance and motivation, especially in relation to the prosocial behavior in the workplace.

With these points in mind, we can state that the capacity to manage negative environmental conditions and take advantage of positive environments is nowadays an essential workplace competence for consistency in decision-making and, ultimately, for better performance. It is a skill intrinsically related to awareness, intrinsic management, and self-regulation in relation to organizational variables, rather than actual decisions at hand. Although the effective management of environmental conditions can provide a clearer space in which decisions may be made, these should be considered distinct concepts. We referred to this composite skill as decisional environment management (DEM), firstly conceptualized by as operational causal structures examined within context of managerial decision-making in dynamic environments. Their research position was directed to examine decisions in dynamic organizations while the individual is coping with ongoing activities, because already at the time: "much of the research on human decision-making examines discrete judgments in static environments under no taxing conditions". Such interactional causal structures were defined through a triadic model of the antecedes of the mastery of the decisional environment, namely: the cognitive determinants and the quality of analytic thinking, the behavioral mechanisms of the choice management and the properties of the organizational environment. Applied results of such a model confirmed that several factors might account for differential impact on decision processes, in which cognitive regulatory mechanisms firstly alter the systematic exploratory strategies, and the organizational management at second stage.

Because of the primary importance given to the decision environment model regarding managerial decisions (like most of the research of the last century has focused on decision-making applied to organizations), a revised version of DEM with the intent of extending this model to different job categories, even subordinates, has introduced the role of colleagues and of supervisor and as interpersonal behavioral determinants of choice in the workplace (Ceschi et al., submitted). Considering the renewed role of work environment on decision-making due to unsure professional pathways, with the emerging of new boundaryless organizational structures and empowerment policies, relevant decisions are often made at several levels not only by the top management. This research emergence has brought several scholars of the I/O domain to extend again decision research inside organizations at several roles.