Yasmin Schwegler
University of Lausanne
Towards an ecological model of how employees decide whether to deviate from a working procedure
(Yasmin Schwegler, Julian Marewski, Ulrich Hoffrage)
How do employees manage trade-offs between strict adherence to a working procedure or routine, and deviance from it? Such trade-offs are typically faced by white-collar workers in medium-sized and large companies, where work procedures are established but jobs also require some independent judgment, which can lead to recognizing more appropriate solutions and thus deviating from the procedure. Since it is not evident ex-ante if the adherence to or deviance from a procedure leads to a better outcome, deviation decisions are made under uncertainty. Well-established descriptive models of decision making under uncertainty are heuristics. As particularly simple decision strategies they exploit the structure of decision environments, and can thus aid people making smart decisions. The interplay of decisional processes and environments has been at the focus of much research outside the area of professional decision making (e.g. Marewski et al., 2010). Past work on professional decision making, in particular workplace deviance, has instead mostly focused on people’s personality traits (e.g. De Clercq et al., 2014; Holtz & Harold, 2013), with notable exceptions (e.g. Lin et al., 2016). We aim to develop a model of how environmental properties might, in interplay with heuristic decision processes, lead employees to stick to a procedure or to deviate from it. While recent experiments on these trade-offs focused, for instance, on recruitment decisions (Patil et al., 2017), we start out by turning to employees in the procurement of a multinational company, who have to choose between suppliers while adhering to company procedures. In a qualitative pilot study, we examine the properties of their decision environments and the nature of situations in which deviations from procedures occurred.