Information Acquisition in Promotion Decisions

Abstract

When organizations publicly post notices of promotional opportunities, they often must justify the rejection of unsuccessful applicants, and may therefore decide to rate all applicants. When the process is less public, however, selectors are not required to assign ratings to inferior candidates. We hypothesized that selectors would gather less information on inferior candidates when they were not required to rate them than when they were so required. Results of a study of 157 managers using an information display board methodology confirmed our hypothesis. Contrary to previous research in consumer behavior, individual proxies for “product familiarity,” such as number of years of previous work experience, were not related to information-gathering behavior.