Measurement of Tactical and Strategic Decision Making

Abstract

In a series of three studies, the Decision-Making Questionnaire (DMQ) was developed, which assesses individuals on the basis of their effectiveness, confidence, and use of information when making tactical and strategic organizational decisions. In the first study, 28 managers were asked what they would do when confronted with 40 different organizational situations. In the second study, 8 managers rank ordered the appropriateness of the responses given by the managers in the first study. In the third study, 74 managerial and nonmanagerial personnel rank ordered their preferred response to the situations presented, rated their confidence with regard to the rank ordering they had used, rank ordered the importance of the information they used to make the decisions, and indicated the importance of the decision to the organization depicted in the scenario. A series of Friedman two-way ANOVAs was conducted to examine respondent agreement. The 5 tactical and 5 strategic scenarios that were most reliable were retained for further analyses. Tactical and strategic effectiveness scores derived from responses to the 10 scenarios were calculated and correlated with three managerial- and educational-related variables. Statistically significant, but low to moderate coefficients were obtained between the tactical effectiveness score and managerial level r = - .27, salary r = - .28, and education r = - .26. Further, it was shown that tactical and strategic effectiveness scores were unrelated to confidence scores as hypothesized.

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