Judgment and Decision Making at Work

Employees are constantly making decisions and judgments that have the potential to affect themselves, their families, their work organizations, and on some occasion even the broader societies in which they live. A few examples include: deciding which job applicant to hire, setting a production goal, judging one’s level of job satisfaction, deciding to steal from the cash register, agreeing to help organize the company’s holiday party, forecasting corporate tax rates two years later, deciding to report a coworker for sexual harassment, and predicting the level of risk inherent in a new business venture. In other words, a great many topics of interest to organizational researchers ultimately reduce to decisions made by employees.

Yet, numerous entreaties notwithstanding, industrial and organizational psychologists typically have not incorporated a judgment and decision-making perspective in their research. The current book begins to remedy the situation by facilitating cross-pollination between the disciplines of organizational psychology and decision-making. The book describes both laboratory and more “naturalistic” field research on judgment and decision-making, and applies it to core topics of interest to industrial and organizational psychologists: performance appraisal, employee selection, individual differences, goals, leadership, teams, and stress, among others. The book also suggests ways in which industrial and organizational psychology research can benefit the discipline of judgment and decision-making. The authors of the chapters in this book conduct research at the intersection of organizational psychology and decision-making, and consequently are uniquely positioned to bridging the divide between the two disciplines.

Scott Highhouse is a Professor and Ohio Eminent Scholar in the Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University. He received his PhD in 1992 from the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Scott served as Associate Editor of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP) from 2001–2007, and as Associate Editor of the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology from 2007–2009. He is currently co-editor, with Neal Schmitt, of the Industrial-Organizational Psychology volume of Wiley’s Handbook of Psychology.

Reeshad S. Dalal received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2003. He is now an associate professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Chair-Elect of the Psychology Department at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Eduardo Salas is Trustee Chair and Pegasus Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Florida (UCF). He also holds an appointment as Program Director for the Human Systems Integration Research Department at UCF’s Institute for Simulation & Training. Previously, he was a Senior Research Psychologist and Head of the Training Technology Development Branch of NAVAIR-Orlando for fifteen years. During this period, Dr. Salas served as a principal investigator for numerous R&D programs focusing on teamwork, team training, simulation-based training, decision making under stress, learning methodologies, and performance assessment.