Before Virtuous Practice. Public and Private Sector-Specific Preferences for Intuition and Deliberation in Decision-Making

Abstract

There are a number of well-established concepts explaining decision-making.The sociology of wise practice within public administration suggests that thinking preferences like the use of intuition form a cornerstone of public administrators' virtuous practice. This contribution uses conceptual and theoretical resources from the behavioral sciences and public administration to account for individual level differences of employees with regard to thinking preferences in the public sector. Institutional frameworks and social structures may enable or impede the habituation of virtue. The contribution empirically investigates this proposition with respondents from North America and the European Union. The analysis investigates the behavioral dimension preference for intuition/preference for deliberation. An analysis of data from 333 employees from organizations in North America and 1644 employees from organizations in the EU reveal prevalent differences in the preference for thinking styles. The public and private sector differ significantly in terms of the preference for rational as well as for intuitive thinking. What is exciting is that private employees rank higher than public employees on both scales, whereas the difference in rational thinking shows a small effect and the effect size in regard of intuitive thinking is negligible. We explore possible explanations for such differences and similarities.

Credibility and trust of information privacy at the workplace in Slovakia. The use of intuition

“…Management education can help to shape intuitive decision-making to prevent perceived privacy intrusions. Institutional frameworks and social structures may enable or impede the use of intuition (Svenson et al, 2022), thus respondents from different industries (Svenson et al, 2020) might have a varying propensity to use intuition around information privacy issues.…”

“…Therefore, we hypothesize that credibility and trust of information privacy at the workplace is partially a result of people’s experience. For example, people know how much they can trust specific digital technologies based on their experience with systems in their organizations (Taddeo, 2017). Furthermore, domain experience, in this case with the use of ICTs, might enhance intuitive thinking (Hogarth, 2010).…”

“…When we investigate the perceived credibility and trustworthiness of information about personal data protection, we consider the fact that this is in part due to previous experience with information and communication technologies (ICTs) (see also Pickard et al , 2010, cited in Rubin, 2022). Based on their prior experiences with similar systems at work, individuals have a good idea of whether a given digital technology is reliable (Taddeo, 2017).…”

Different Types of Intuition at the Workplace: An Integrative Review

“…Particularly in business schools, decisionmaking is taught as rational analysis. However, tacit knowledge and heuristics have received increasing attention in the business literature in recent years (De Vries et al, 2008;Elbanna, 2006;Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011;Launer et al, 2022;Svenson et al, 2023;Svenson et al, 2020;Svenson et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2021). In the practice of economics and business administration, the concept of intuition has not yet entered the mainstream.…”