Title: Decision's familiarity and strategic decision-making process output: the mediating impact of rationality of the decision-making process

Authors: Mahmood Nooraie

Addresses: Department of Management, Islamic Azad University, Abhar Branch, No. 7, Aftab Ave., Basti St., Lavasan, post-code 3341633881, Iran

Abstract: Many managerial researches in the past several decades, especially in the early 1980s, have investigated and written about managerial strategic decision-making from a variety of dimensions and perspectives (e.g., Simon, 1965; Mintzberg et al., 1976; Weihrich and Koontz, 1993; Amason, 1996; Thompson and Strickland, 2003; Gamble and Thompson, 2009). In spite of this ongoing attention, the subject of strategic decision-making is still in a contradictory and controversial phase with theoretical dilemmas. Thus, a need remains for the development and testing of hypotheses relating the nature of the strategic decision-making process to contextual factors. The goal was to extend prior work on factors influencing the strategic decision-making process, and investigate the possible relationship between a decision|s familiarity and quality of the decision process output while rationality of the decision-making process mediates their relationship. Results based on a field study of 151 managers from 42 manufacturing firms indicate that the extent of rationality in the strategic decision-making process positively mediates the relationship between decision familiarity and decision process output.

Keywords: decision-making processes; strategic decisions; decision familiarity; decision process output; rational models; mediating impacts; mediation; rationality; decision quality; managers; management; manufacturing industry; Malaysia; applied decision sciences.

DOI: 10.1504/IJADS.2011.043306

International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, 2011 Vol.4 No.4, pp.385 - 400

Published online: 29 Sep 2014 *

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