Abstract:
We suggest how people tend to make decisions in organizational
change situations regarding certainty, risk, and rationality. Placed in
one of two roles: change agent or change target, participants
responded to a role-playing downsizing scenario with either two
loss- or two gain-framed options from which to choose. We found
that participants, regardless of role and option frame, preferred
more certain options to risky options; they also tended to be less
rational when making decisions, relying more on their principles.
Likewise, change targets tend to be more creative than agents by
presenting alternative options to replace the two given options for
resolving the problem. These findings help us better understand how to efficiently
implement organizational changes to ensure smoother decision
processes with better results.
