Decisões Corporativas Em Grupo: Uma Abordagem Comportamental

Abstract

Important organizational decisions are commonly made within groups. Within financial institutions, it is not rare for credit concessions to be decided by committees. In the government sphere, fundamental decisions, such as defining the economy's primary interest rate, are also made in collegiate. In large private companies, the board of directors is at the top of the organizational hierarchy and has the final word on investment strategies, financing, and mergers and acquisitions. However, the peculiarities of the group decision process are widely ignored in finance literature, which usually considers the group as if it were an individual. For example, studies in the field of behavioral corporate finance emphasize the cognitive processes and biases of the individual decision maker, but pay little attention to how these processes interact to make a group decision (for a literature review, see Baker & Wurgler, 2013). In this essay, I present, in a concise, selective manner, the current state of the emerging multidisciplinary discussion on the decision process in small groups and emphasize its behavioral aspects. First, I cover the advantages and difficulties of the group decision compared with the individual decision. Then, I present recent contributions indicating that the quality of group decisions depends on the context and on how small changes in the decision environment can have important consequences. THE GROUP AND THE INDIVIDUALIn a recent review of the literature on experimental psychology and related areas, Tindale and Kluwe (2015) show that, in many contexts, group decisions yield better results than decisions made by individuals alone. Groups have an easier time finding correct solutions for problems. They generate more precise forecasts and more creative ideas. They have better results in negotiations and academic tests. The contracting decisions made are superior, and information is recovered more precisely (i.e., they have a "collective memory" superior to individual memory).One of the oldest and most consolidated research lines in this field investigates the phenomena of "wisdom of crowds," concluding that groups are efficient mechanisms for aggregating individual estimates and opinions when the members do not interact with each other. For example, Ariely et al. (2000) show that, under certain statistic conditions, the mean estimate from a group will always be better than the individual estimate of any of its members. This argument is supported by many empirical studies conducted in realistic conditions. The social nature of the decision is probably an adaptive response to the conditions that shaped the evolution of life in society. The group decision process may have contributed to reducing individual cognitive limitations, and thus increased the availability of resources to everyone. Following this line, Hastie and Kameda (2005) simulated the choice of appropriate hunting sites by huntergatherer groups. Comparing different alternative decisions, the authors reported that simple majority/ plurality ...