Fast-and-frugal trees as noncompensatory models of performance-based personnel decisions

• Main Authors: LUAN, Shenghua, REB, Jochen
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Fast-and-frugal trees; Cue-based decision making; Dynamic performance; Personnel decisions; Process models; Forced distributions; Ecological rationality; Human Resources Management; Organizational Behavior and Theory
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/5145; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/lkcsb_research/article/6144/viewcontent/FFTs_for_Personnel_Decisions_OBHDP_2017_afv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Employees’ performance provides the basis for many personnel decisions, and to make these decisions,managers often need to integrate information from different performance-related cues. We asked college students and experienced managers to make a series of performance-based personnel decisions and tested how well weighting-and-adding, compensatory logistic regression and lexicographic, noncompensatory fast-and-frugal trees (FFTs) could describe participants’ decision processes regarding both choices and reaction times. Results show that a significant proportion of the participants (i.e., nearly half of the college students and more than two-thirds of the experienced managers) applied FFTs to make such decisions,and that the majority of them adopted key features of FFTs adaptively in response to a manipulationof the required distributions of positive (bonus) or negative (termination) decisions. Overall, the process-oriented approach applied in our study provides insights on not only what cues managers use for performance-based personnel decisions, but also how they use these cues.