Decision-Making Styles in the Workplace: Relationships Between Self-Report Questionnaires and a Contextualized Measure of the Analytical-Systematic Versus Global-Intuitive Approach

Two procedures were adopted to assess decision-making styles in the workplace: (i) the administration of traditional standardized self-report questionnaires and (ii) open-ended questions about the way respondents would take decisions in a critical business case. Seventy-four adults were given two questionnaires: the Preference for Intuition and Deliberation (PID), which assesses “deliberative” or “intuitive” decision style, and the Style of Learning and Thinking (SOLAT), which assesses thinking styles as “left” (namely, analytical-systematic) or “right” (that is, global-intuitive). Participants were also presented with a business case which involved taking a decision. Responses to the business case were used to classify approaches to decision making as “analytical-systematic” or “global-intuitive”. Results showed that the questionnaires correlated consistently with scores from the business case, thus supporting the notion that the assessment of decision style through self-report questionnaire is reliable and valid.