Three essays on organizational risk-taking: Top managers characteristics, performance feedback, and time
- Autores: Xavier Maria Sobrepere i Profitós
- Directores de la Tesis: Africa Ariño (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad de Navarra ( España ) en 2018
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Joan Enric Ricart i Costa (presid.), Anneloes Raes (secret.), Dimo Ringov (voc.), Thomas Keil (voc.), Pino G. Audia (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencias de la Dirección por la Universidad de Navarra
- Materias:
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- Resumen
This dissertation explores how organizations address risky opportunities by taking into consideration the fact that organizational decisions depend on the bounded rationality of decision makers. In the first chapter, I keep the analysis at the managerial level and I investigate how upper echelon managers address international joint venture (IJV) opportunities, which are strategic investments involving risk. My results show that short-tenured managers are affected by their individual risk orientation, derived from their career stage, while long-tenured managers are affected by the risk orientation of their firms, as perceived by them. These findings suggest that tenure in the firm restrict managers awareness of courses of action, thus restricting managerial discretion. In the first chapter, I also develop arguments predicting that managers risk orientation should increase as they gain experience early in their careers and decrease as they near retirement late in their careers. I find support for this prediction in the context of IJV evaluations.
In the second chapter, I investigate how organizations address risky opportunities as a function of both the intrinsic characteristics of the opportunity (magnitude of potential gains/losses and probability of success/failure), as well as their performance feedback (defined by current performance level and deadline proximity). My results show that the intrinsic characteristics of the risky opportunity affect organizational risk-taking, and that these effects are driven by the current performance level and deadline proximity.
Finally, in the third chapter, I show that decision makers self-confidence (captured by their situational self-confidence) leads to self-enhancement of performance assessments when possible, and thus to weaker responses to performance shortfalls. Nonetheless, decision makers self-confidence leads to stronger responses when decision makers lack a self-enhancing cognitive strategy for performance assessments. Also, my results show that time slack can be used as a cognitive strategy to self-enhance performance assessments.
