{"title":"Often wrong, never in doubt: Mitigating leadership overconfidence in decision-making","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/j.orgdyn.2023.101011","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Leaders are often celebrated for quick and decisive actions. Such actions include the ability to cut through the chaff and make rapid decisions in fast-paced environments. However, while decisiveness is admirable, poor decision-making is not. And an increasing amount of research informs us that leaders tend to be far too overconfident about their decision-making ability. First, this article details several ways that leaders’unconscious cognitive biases can cloud their decision-making ability. These biases such as attribution bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the planning fallacy, and jumping to faulty conclusions are particularly dangerous because everyone is infected by them—yet, because of the bias blind spot, leaders tend to naturally believe they are immune. Second, this article details ways that leaders can “mistake proof” their decision-making process. By exercising activities like pre-mortems, speed-accuracy tradeoffs, reference class forecasting, and improving reflective capacity, leaders can impose systems and methods to help protect their decision-making against their greatest potential nemesis—themselves.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48061,"journal":{"name":"Organizational Dynamics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Organizational Dynamics","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0090261623000554","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"BUSINESS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Leaders are often celebrated for quick and decisive actions. Such actions include the ability to cut through the chaff and make rapid decisions in fast-paced environments. However, while decisiveness is admirable, poor decision-making is not. And an increasing amount of research informs us that leaders tend to be far too overconfident about their decision-making ability. First, this article details several ways that leaders’unconscious cognitive biases can cloud their decision-making ability. These biases such as attribution bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the planning fallacy, and jumping to faulty conclusions are particularly dangerous because everyone is infected by them—yet, because of the bias blind spot, leaders tend to naturally believe they are immune. Second, this article details ways that leaders can “mistake proof” their decision-making process. By exercising activities like pre-mortems, speed-accuracy tradeoffs, reference class forecasting, and improving reflective capacity, leaders can impose systems and methods to help protect their decision-making against their greatest potential nemesis—themselves.
期刊介绍:
Organizational Dynamics domain is primarily organizational behavior and development and secondarily, HRM and strategic management. The objective is to link leading-edge thought and research with management practice. Organizational Dynamics publishes articles that embody both theoretical and practical content, showing how research findings can help deal more effectively with the dynamics of organizational life.