Managers decide on purpose and time-optimized

Managers can make decisions faster, according to a study

06.09.2012

When executives make decisions, they are more efficient in terms of time than other people. This was the result of an investigation by Forschungszentrum Jülich. Thus, a particular brain region helps to store knowledge categorized and automatically retrieve in similar situations.

Managers make decision based on experience
Every day, man makes innumerable decisions. In the process, a neural network is activated, in which the parietal lobe first processes all sensory perceptions and then passes them on to the prefrontal cortex, which acts as the control center of all actions and links the signals with the already existing knowledge to similar problems. The stored information may refer to the memory of a particular successful approach or the emotional assessment of past situations. The motivation to tackle the problem also plays a role. It is assessed and compared with the current condition. Only then does the brain make a decision.

Managers and executives need to be able to make decisions quickly and effectively. Researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich, together with business psychologists and sociologists from the University of Cologne, investigated the question of whether other neural networks are activated in the brain than in people without leadership positions. Their results were in the „Trade journal PLoS ONE“ released.

Managers activate specific brain regions for time-efficient decisions
Svenja Caspers and her team examined 35 managers from different industries as well as a comparison group of non-managerial employees, who corresponded to the managers in terms of age, intelligence and gender. In the magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) subjects had to make a total of 540 decisions within 22 minutes. „Within two seconds, the subjects had to choose a term from a pair of words such as 'teamwork' or 'success' or 'power' or 'loyalty', "Caspers explains a sample task. „With this abundance of decisions and time constraints, we wanted to simulate the decision-making density of executives on an experimental level, "says the neuroscientist.

As it turned out, the groups activated different decision-making systems within a network in the brain that is activated by all humans in these processes. The executives showed significant activity in the caudate nucleus, the so-called tail core, while the non-managers primarily used other regions within the network that make incremental decisions and therefore take longer decisions. The tailing core builds categorized knowledge within the decision network, which is then called automatically in similar situations. Decisions are thus made more effective and time-optimized.

However, it is still unclear whether the resource-efficient way of decision-making has been trained by the managers or conditioned by the socialization part of the personality. „People are shaped in their personality from birth. Thus, this question could only be clarified in the context of a long-term study, "Caspers explains, and the researchers were also unable to answer the question of the quality of the decisions.

Image: Juergen Jotzo