| In the last 25 years, research into decision-making has surged across a number of academic disciplines, stimulated particularly by the need for improving decision outcomes among those in leadership and managerial positions in defense, public policy and economic enterprises. Conventional wisdom and mounting empirical evidence suggest that contrary to early economic theories based on rational cognitive models, personality traits and transient emotion play an important role in decision-making processes. A major obstacle to understanding the role of emotion in decision making is distinguishing between stable, trait personality effects that characterize an individual's typical manner of taking action toward survival vs. the emotional states or transient moods that arise in response to immediate internal and external environmental conditions. While this study failed to demonstrate significant correlations between personality trait optimism, transient emotion and risk taking in economic decision-making, an unintended finding was that overall, both male and female managers were significantly pessimistic. The study also supported earlier findings that risk taking is asymmetrical between gains and losses, with managers almost twice as likely to take risks to avoid losses than to achieve gains. |
