The decision rules individuals use to judge wrongdoing committed inside corporations and other hierarchical organizations are not well understood. We explore this issue by asking random samples of individuals in Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington, D. C., to respond to four short vignettes describing acts of wrongdoing by people in corporations. The vignettes are experiments that manipulate the actor's mental state, the actor's position in the organization, and whether the actor's decision was influenced by others in the organization. We examine (1) the distribution of responsibility among people in the organization, (2) how individual responsibility affects the attribution of responsibility to the organization itself, and (3) cross‐national differences in attributions. We find that both what the actors did (their deeds) and the position they occupied (their roles) significantly influence the responsibility attributed to them. The responsibility attributed to the organizations themselves is a function of the responsibility attributed to the actors inside the organization, but not a function of the independent variables in the experiments. Cross‐national differences emerge with respect to the responsibility assigned both to individuals and to the organizations themselves. We discuss implications of these results for past and future work.
The decision rules indieriduals use to judge cvrongdoing committed inside corporations and other hierarchical organizations are not well understood.We explore this issue by asking random samples of individuals in Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C., to respond to four short vignettes describing acts of wrongdoing by people in corporations. The vignettes are expperiments that manipulate the actor's mental s w , the actor's position in the organization, and whether the actor's decision was influenced by others in the organid o n . We examine ( I ) the distribution of responsibility among people in the organization, (2) how individual responsibility affects the attribution of responsibility to the organization itself, and (3) cross-national differences in attributions. We find that both what the actors did (their deeds) and the position they occupied (their roles) signifkandy influence the responsibility attributed to them. The responsibility attributed to the organizations themselves is a function of the responsibiliey attributed to the actors inside the organization, but not a function of the independent variubles in the expm'ments. Cross-national differences emerge with respect to the responsibility Joseph Sanders is A. A. White Professor of Law at the University of Houston. V. Lee Hamilton is chair of the
There are many creative thinking manual methods in the world. They are brainstorming method, brain-writing method, mind mapping, NM method, Equivalent Transformation method, KJ method, etc. Human thinking process for creative problem solving consists of four sub-processes. They are divergent thinking sub-process, convergent thinking sub-process, idea crystallization sub-process, and idea verification sub-process. In accordance with this proposal, most Japanese research and development is centered on this four types of creative thinking manual methods and support systems. In this paper, we describe three types of Group Decision Support Systems (DSSs) for creative problem solving, similar to KJ method. All design philosophy depends on bottom-up decision-making. They are knowledge acquisition support groupware GRAPE, consensus-making support systems Group Coordinator (I) and Group Coordinator (II). The characteristic function of GRAPE is knowledge merging for GRAPE users, and that of Group-Coordinator (I) and Group-Coordinator (II) is tradeoff resolution by sensitivity analysis and adjusting of user requirements by the QDA method, respectively. The systems that we have developed are similar to the KJ method, which is the most popular methodology for creative problem solving in Japan. The essence of our developed methodology and tools is that it boosts intellectual productivity. GRAPE and its successors can speed-up the given group decision making problem by two to three times with respect to the idea crystallization (evaluation and judgment) sub-process.
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