I Won't Back Down? Complexity and Courage in Government Executive Decision Making

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kelman, Steven; Sanders, Ronald; Pandit, Gayatri
• 署名单位: Harvard University; Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation
• 刊物名称: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-3352
• DOI: 10.1111/puar.12476
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 465-471
• 关键词: performance

摘要

Senior government executives make many difficult decisions, but research suggests that individual cognitive limitations and the pathologies of groupthink impede their ability to make value-maximizing choices. From this literature has emerged a normative model that Irving Janis calls vigilant problem solving, a process intended for the most complex decisions. To explore its use by senior public officials, the authors interviewed 20 heads of subcabinet-level organizations in the U.S. federal government, asking how they made their most difficult decisions. The initial focus was on whether they employed a vigilant approach to making decisions that were informationally, technically, or politically complex. Most executives identified their single most-difficult decision as one that required courage; they often made such courageous decisions after personal reflection and/or consultation with a small number of trusted advisors rather in ways that could be described as vigilant. The different approaches for making complex decisions, compared with those involving courage, are discussed and a contingency model of effective executive decision making is proposed that requires leaders ( and their advisors) to be ambidextrous in their approach.