Proactive interventions at work

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Starting date
October 15, 2018
Duration (months)
36
Departments
Human Sciences
Managers or local contacts
Ceschi Andrea , Sartori Riccardo , Tommasi Francesco

Companies lose an average of 3 percent of their annual profits due to poor management decisions. This is according to Gartner, a multinational business consulting firm, which conducted a study on financial decision-making in 2018, involving 469 business managers and 128 financial executives. Of the managers surveyed, 61 percent reported an increase in the number of strategic decisions made over the past three years, and 57 percent said these decisions had a significant impact on the profit made. Recently, things have been changing: many of the strategic decisions made at the corporate level are no longer the sole province of the C-suite. According to PageGroup’s Executive Trends 2022 report, the most innovative companies prefer a cross-functional form of leadership that includes collective decision-making mechanisms. Of course, this mechanism implies an increase in the number of people responsible for making decisions for the good of the company. It is therefore necessary to pay more attention to the decision-making processes of people in the workplace in order to avoid the occurrence of systematic errors of judgment or cognitive shortcuts.
Research on this topic shows that organizational decisions are often the result of ingrained preferences and subjective expectations that follow the logic of situational appropriateness (March 1994). The illogical premises on which decisions are often based are called heuristics and cognitive biases. The concept of heuristics was first introduced by Herbert Simon (1957), according to which individuals use an algorithm already present in their cognitive system to economize cognitive resources. When the mental shortcut interferes with the logical mental process, individuals may develop biases, i.e., tendencies to draw illogical and irrational conclusions (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). The growing interest in decision-making skills in organizational contexts has led occupational psychology to develop several training interventions, including self-nudging and job crafting, developed through laboratory experiments; self-nudging aims to improve awareness in decision-making processes (Gerling, 2009). This process is presented as an intervention that acts on the cognitive-behavioral system of individuals to modify the heuristic patterns they apply to their work, encouraging their proactivity and personal resources. Job crafting, on the other hand, involves the application of new behavioral paradigms that align employees’ perspectives with organizational demands (Petrou et al., 2012). What distinguishes the job crafting intervention from most other job redesign approaches is the recognition of the central role of the individual in achieving organizational goals. Both interventions aim to support individuals in reorganizing their work and the way they approach work tasks by helping them develop optimal decision-making techniques. Overall, these interventions are found to be functional in achieving a new and improved propensity for job redesign with positive consequences for their well-being.

References
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Sponsors:

Funds: assigned and managed by the department

Project participants

Andrea Ceschi
Associate Professor
Riccardo Sartori
Associate Professor
Francesco Tommasi
Temporary Professor

Collaboratori esterni

Joshua Weller
Tilburg University
Evangelia Demerouti
Eindhoven University of Technology
Research areas involved in the project
Formazione e organizzazioni
work and organizational psychology
Publications
Title Authors Year
Learning in the workplace: Evidence on the role of behavioral job crafting on fostering self-perceived employability Sartori, R.; Tommasi, F.; Ceschi, A.; Noventa, S.; &, ; Zene, M. 2023
A combined resources-strength intervention: Empirical evidence from two streams of the positive psychology approach Ceschi, Andrea; Sartori, Riccardo; Tommasi, Francesco; Noventa, Stefano; Morandini, Sofia; Zagarese, Vivian 2022
An empirical evaluation of tech interventions to improve financial decision-making Tommasi, Francesco; Ceschi, Andrea; Weller, Joshua; Costantini, Arianna; Passaia, Giulia; Gostimir, Marija; Sartori, Riccardo 2021
GAME-BASED TRAINING: AN EFFECTIVE METHOD FOR REDUCING BEHAVIOURAL-FINANCE BIASES Tommasi, Francesco; Ceschi, Andrea; Gostimir, Marija; Perini, Marco; Sartori, Riccardo 2021
Implementing Job Crafting Behaviors: Exploring the Effects of a Job Crafting Intervention Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior Costantini, Arianna; Demerouti, Evangelia; Ceschi, Andrea; Sartori, Riccardo 2020
The role of a new strength-based intervention on organisation-based self-esteem and work engagement: A three-wave intervention study Costantini, Arianna; Ceschi, Andrea; Viragos, Anna; De Paola, Francesco; Sartori, Riccardo 2019
How Do You Manage Change in Organizations? Training, Development, Innovation, and Their Relationships Sartori, Riccardo; Costantini, Arianna; Ceschi, Andrea; Tommasi, Francesco 2018
Work engagement and psychological capital in the Italian public administration: A new resource-based intervention programme Costantini, Arianna; De Paola, Francesco; Ceschi, Andrea; Sartori, Riccardo; Meneghini, Anna M.; Di Fabio, Annamaria 2017

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