Abstract
Purpose
– Executives are challenged every day to make important decisions
that affect the performance of their business enterprises and, as
a result, the success of their own careers. Based on that scenario,
one cannot expect that only the rational approach works like a panacea
for all managerial problems. This paper aims to propose that the best
solution tends to embrace a complementary or integrated decision-making
approach.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper seeks to demonstrate that the convergence between
rational and non-rational decision-making processes can be optimized
by integrating several religious
tenets.
Findings
– The paper finds strong evidence that a religion-based framework
might enrich the sensitive topic of decision-making processes in organizations.
Practical implications
– Overall, the paper strives to show that intuition and prayer
are two faces
of the same coin, and argues that both forms of decision processes
(e.g. rational and non-rational analysis) might coexist perfectly
in an integrative frame.
Originality/value
– The article proposes prayer as a transcendent coping mechanism
whereby executives might refine their intuition flux. As a result,
it depicts a conceptual framework encapsulating all those constructs.
Keywords
– Beliefs, Religion, Decision making, Managers
Paper type
– Conceptual paper
Introduction
Decision making has been one of the hottest topics investigated in
management science. After all, executives are challenged every day
to make important decisions that affect the performance of their business
enterprises and, as a result, the success of their own careers. Further,
nowadays businessmen and businesswomen have to deal with a lot of
things ranging from hiring, product portfolio, pricing policy, branding
and internal relationships to legislation, stakeholders’ claims,
acquisitions, mergers,environmental issues, competitors, alliances,
technology breakthroughs and the community, to name but a few. Taken
together, all these points have contributed to making managers’
lives very harsh. Worse still, it seems that every day new variables
are added to the organizational decision-making process, making it
an increasingly complex task.
