Abstract:Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify under what circumstances advisor gender and advice justification influence advice taking by managers.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors designed a quasirational managerial decision experiment with both analytic and intuitive cues. The design was a 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial, in which gender (male/female) and advice justification (intuitive/analytic) were crossed. The experiment involved two independent samples, taken from Amazon Mechanical Turk wor… Show more
“…Third, good justifications can also increase utilization. Participants in two studies that manipulated whether advice was justified by formal analysis or instead by intuition tended to prefer the former, utilizing advice justified by intuitions only when they had strong reasons to believe that said intuitions were well-founded (Ribeiro et al, 2020†; Tzioti et al, 2014†). In another study, participants reported preferring additional information about the alternatives over direct recommendations for or against actions, likely because it helped them improve decision accuracy and maintain decision autonomy (Dalal & Bonaccio, 2010‡).…”
We conducted a systematic review of 143 empirical studies of advice-based decision making published in management or psychology between 2006 and 2020. We identified two distinct streams of the literature. The first, behavioral research, features experimental research on advice-based decisions conducted in laboratories. The second, organizational research, features observational field research on advice-based decisions in organizations. We organized the findings from the two research streams around three sequential stages: advice solicitation and provision, advice utilization, and the outcomes of advice-based decisions. Our review reveals the two streams to be highly complementary—with behavioral research focusing primarily on advice utilization and organizational research focusing primarily on advice solicitation. We consolidate key findings across the two streams. We also identify key challenges for future research, such as greater emphasis on the social aspects of advice-based decisions and the continued development and refinement of normative benchmarks.
“…Third, good justifications can also increase utilization. Participants in two studies that manipulated whether advice was justified by formal analysis or instead by intuition tended to prefer the former, utilizing advice justified by intuitions only when they had strong reasons to believe that said intuitions were well-founded (Ribeiro et al, 2020†; Tzioti et al, 2014†). In another study, participants reported preferring additional information about the alternatives over direct recommendations for or against actions, likely because it helped them improve decision accuracy and maintain decision autonomy (Dalal & Bonaccio, 2010‡).…”
We conducted a systematic review of 143 empirical studies of advice-based decision making published in management or psychology between 2006 and 2020. We identified two distinct streams of the literature. The first, behavioral research, features experimental research on advice-based decisions conducted in laboratories. The second, organizational research, features observational field research on advice-based decisions in organizations. We organized the findings from the two research streams around three sequential stages: advice solicitation and provision, advice utilization, and the outcomes of advice-based decisions. Our review reveals the two streams to be highly complementary—with behavioral research focusing primarily on advice utilization and organizational research focusing primarily on advice solicitation. We consolidate key findings across the two streams. We also identify key challenges for future research, such as greater emphasis on the social aspects of advice-based decisions and the continued development and refinement of normative benchmarks.
The degree to which people take advice, and the factors that influence advice-taking, are of broad interest to laypersons, professionals, and policy-makers. This meta-analysis on 346 effect sizes from 129 independent datasets (N = 17, 296) assessed the weight of advice in the judge-advisor system paradigm, as well as the influence of sample and task characteristics. Information about the advisor(s) that is suggestive of advice quality was the only unique predictor of the overall pooled weight of advice. Individuals adjusted estimates by 32%, 37%, and 48% in response to advisors described in ways that suggest low, neutral, or high quality advice, respectively. This indicates that the benefits of compromise and averaging may be lost if accurate advice is perceived to be low quality, or too much weight is given to inaccurate advice that is perceived to be high quality. When examining the three levels of perceived quality separately, advice-taking was greater for subjective and uncertain estimates, relative to objective estimates, when information about the advisor was neutral in terms of advice quality. Sample characteristics had no effect on advice-taking, thus providing no evidence that age, gender, or individualism influence the weight of advice. The findings contribute to current theoretical debates and provide direction for future research.
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