The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior by Stephen M. Colarelli & Richard D. Arvey

Author:Stephen M. Colarelli & Richard D. Arvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

NINE

Evolved Decision Makers in Organizations

Peter DeScioli, Robert Kurzban, and Peter M. Todd

1. INTRODUCTION

Managers and leaders in organizations seek to influence people’s behavior to achieve the organization’s objectives. How can they accomplish this goal? A traditional economic approach focuses attention on people’s incentives. For example, managers can offer financial rewards to promote desirable behavior and set financial penalties to inhibit undesirable behavior. This intuitive idea can help managers to align individuals’ incentives with organizational goals. Nonetheless, we argue that, even if it is sometimes useful, the traditional economic approach to people’s behavior is deeply flawed. It ignores fundamental insights from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, and cognitive science. People are much more than simple incentive-chasers who pursue carrots and avoid sticks; they are computational problem-solvers.

To solve a problem, one needs to use the right tool for the job. The mind has a variety of computational programs so that it can solve a variety of problems (Pinker 1997). Like a carpenter choosing from a box of tools, the human mind uses cues to select which computational program best fits the job. The cognitive mechanisms that are selected to process incoming information determine how people represent their circumstances, how they understand the current situation, and ultimately how they behave. This implies that it is not incentives per se that shape behavior, but people’s representations of their environment. These representations can, to be sure, be influenced by incentives, but sometimes in unpredictable ways. For example, people might represent the imposition of a financial penalty not only as a cost, but also as an act of attempted coercion. Modeling the situation as coercion, people might respond with defiance and seek rather than avoid the penalty, causing incentives to backfire. Similarly, the threat of a penalty might be viewed as moral license to perform the act in question, as long as the actor is willing to endure the cost, thereby increasing, rather than decreasing, the undesired behavior (Gneezy and Rustichini 2000). Indeed, a wealth of experimental evidence shows that both positive and negative incentives can have the opposite of the desired effect (Bowles 2008).

With a better understanding of the human mind’s toolkit, managers can seek to modify the organizational environment to trigger particular tools and cue sets in people that will lead to behavior in line with the organization’s goals. The organization can be understood as an environment that people seek to comprehend and interact with in functional ways by applying evolved cognitive mechanisms. Importantly, each of these cognitive mechanisms is specialized for a distinct type of problem, and understanding this menu of programs is critical for understanding and managing behavior.

Moreover, at the same time that managers (and organizations) seek to influence other people, those people are also trying to influence the managers’ understanding of the situation (and the organization’s shaping of that situation). How can managers influence a network of people who are trying to influence them? This is also a common problem in human social life more generally, and people use evolved cognitive mechanisms for handling these strategic situations, which we explore in depth below.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.