Decision-making in a dynamic task: effects of goal orientation on stocks and flows performance

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the effects of goal orientation on understanding the dynamics of stocks and flows (SF). Design/methodology/approach The authors use the well-established department store task as the experimental task to evaluate people’s understanding of SF and implement a survey to assess different goal orientation levels. Ordinary least square is used to test the effects of goal orientations on the SF performance. Findings The findings suggest that learning goal orientation is positively associated with SF performance. However, prove and avoid performance goal orientation are unrelated to SF performance. Originality/value The study has important theoretical and practical contributions. From a theoretical perspective, the authors examine the impact of goal orientation in dynamic decision-making to advance the knowledge on the role of goal orientation. Practically, the research demonstrates that learning-goal-oriented people perform better in stock and flow tasks, suggesting that goal orientation is an important trait for recruiting organizational members whose work involves SF decision-making tasks.

Results of Beer Game Trials Played by Natural Resource Managers Versus Students: Does Age Influence Ordering Decisions?

“…Rouwette et al [34], Aramburo et al [35], and Mohaghegh and Furlan [36] have summarized the key findings of the major works in this area based on characteristics of the system or task complexity: Delays, strength and types of feedback, exogenous change, use of heuristics or pattern matching mental models, systems thinking skills, and domain experience. In general, the presence of time delays as well as the length of delays tends to reduce performance [32,37], stronger feedback loops tend to reduce performance [32,[37][38][39][40][41][42], while exogenous changes have shown either reduced [40][41][42], improved [43], or no effect on performance [44]. Additionally, research has found consistent use of several decision making heuristics, particularly ones that employ pattern matching reasoning [30,36,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54], while others have found evidence of poor systems thinking skills to be pervasive throughout most individuals [55][56][57][58].…”

“…• Types of feedback (e.g., numerical, graphical, or both) are known to influence behavior [32,42,[65][66][67].…”

“…Lastly, personal characteristics that likely impact performance (e.g., stated goals; mental model or cognitive styles; the number of players in the simulator) have also shown mixed results, with improved performance resulting from whole system goals and a higher degree of similarity in participant mental model with the structure of the simulation [74][75][76][77][78]. Other studies have shown no effect on performance due to personal characteristics [42,67,[72][73][74].…”

“…Finally, task performance studies that test domain experience, which is often used to understand expertise and where it is assumed that individuals with greater experience employ more powerful heuristics than novices [84,85], have shown that domain experience does not influence task performance [29,42]. This has been found for tests between participant groups (experienced versus inexperienced [29]) or where participants were allowed multiple attempts, given training or an intervention, or with varying feedback protocols [30,49,51,55,[85][86][87][88][89].…”