The Mechanism Of Forward Looking Characteristics Under Organizational Change Decision Making And Multisource Priming

Based on problem-driven and situation-embedded research paradigm, this present research mainly builds a framework of decision contextual characteristic and explores its influence on a multisource priming effect of forward looking decision behavior under emerging industries organizational change such as new energy industry. This paper has carried out four series of research to solving the mechanism.Study one adopts a multi-case study to analyze critical change events in four new energy enterprises, and conceptualizes the contextual elements and structure in view of within-case and between-case analyses. Two of typical decision context are developed in this case study:goal ambiguity and experience reference situation. Then in combination with previous theoretical research, this paper analyzed key decision events from the cases and defined a process-based behavior of forward looking decision making. From a perspective of information processing and action, it distinguished three decision behaviors, such as information search, reference selection and planning.This paper emphatically explores the multisource priming effects under different decision contexts by experimental research, which is divided into three parts and four series of experiments. The behavioral and neural mechanism of multisource priming effects are investigated in the current research. Study two adopts two series of experiments to verify the research hypothesis. The first sub-experiment examines the multisource priming effects of forward looking information search involved in the impact of goal ambiguity context, multisource priming mode and action-based and thought-based cues. The results show that goal ambiguity context do not have a significant main effects on forward-looking information search, and multisource priming mode plays a positive role in the forward looking information search under the condition of thought-based cues, this is distributed priming clicked less forward-looking-based information than serial priming. After controlling preference of participants, goal ambiguity and priming mode exists a significant interactive effect on the information search time (under action-based and thought-based cues condition) and frequency (under action-based cues condition), that is, a distributed priming effect can be strengthened under a higher goal ambiguity context, which could enhance reaction speed and efficiency. An automatic connection between priming stimulus and target response is built by the distributed priming effects. However, under a lower goal ambiguity context, the distributed priming effects are decreased, and in return, the serial priming effects are increased.The second sub-experiment uses a classic research paradigm of subliminal priming and explores the neural mechanism of multisource priming effects of forward-looking decision. The behavioral results show that there are a significant multisource priming effects with time-related words. The future-oriented words can activate the subjects to search and select future-related targets and the past-oriented words can activate the subjects to consider some retrospective targets. Multisource priming mode has a significant main effect. The distributed priming mode is superior to the serial priming in behavioral response and information search. In addition, this experiment finds an interactive effect between priming stimulus and target response. In a specific way, when stimulus and response are consistent in content, the priming stimulus will promote the activation of target reaction, and participants react faster to prospective and retrospective information. However, when the two are inconsistent in content, a suppressive activation effect occurs. Namely, the priming stimulus will prohibit the activation of inconsistent information. The neural results exhibited that prospective and retrospective information response can evoke the ERPs of N100and N200in the region of frontal, parietal and occipital lobe, and distributed priming mode can strengthen the evoked potentials for prospective targets. In addition, multisource priming effects can induce N200and P300components in the frontal area and occipital area, and distributed priming mode has an earlier latency period of evoked potentials than serial priming mode does, and its amplitude value is also higher than the serial type.Study three examines the multisource priming effects of forward-looking decision making process under a context of experience reference. It explores the combined influence of contextual characteristics, multiple priming mode and decision reference on the priming effects. Results show that experience reference context has a significant main effect on the multisource priming effects. Low experience reference context can prompt decision maker to spend much more resource to collect prospective information, and to choose much more potential investment under the influence of selection reference, and to be more willing to face the future planning. Combined with decision reference, experience reference situation has significant interaction with priming mode for the multisource priming effects. As for the task of information search, when information and reference are consistent in content, distributed priming mode can prompt participants spend much less time and frequency to choose their scheme, which promotes the automatic connection between priming stimulus and target response. However, when they are inconsistent, the automatic connection of distributed priming effects is reduced. Experience reference has interactive effects with priming mode on the strategy of planning as well. That is, the distributed priming effect can boost participants'tendency to future-oriented planning in the context of lower experience reference; and the serial priming effect can make participants focus on the current-oriented behavior. In addition, both experience reference and priming mode do not have a significant interactive effect on the task of reference selection.Study four examines the multisource priming effects of forward looking decision making process under a interactive context of goal ambiguity with experience reference. During this study, a single-source priming mode is added to make a comparison with multisource priming mode. Moreover, the study has analyzed the relationship between forward looking decision with its performance. The findings indicate that:1) the three priming modes have a significant main effect on information search and planning. Specifically, the distributed priming effect is superior to the other two priming, especially to the single-source priming.2) As similar with study three, experience reference context has an interactive effect with priming mode on forward looking decision process, that is, the distributed priming effect can promote forward looking decision making more than the other two under the lower experience reference context, and the distributed priming effect is reduced under the higher context. In addition, goal ambiguity context do not show a significant interactive effect on forward looking decision making.3) The interactive context has a significant interactive effect with multisource priming effect on forward looking decision making. Specifically, the distributed priming effect is superior to the serial priming under the combined context of higher-goal-ambiguity and lower-experience-reference, while the serial priming is better under the combined context of lower-goal-ambiguity and higher-experience-reference. There is no significant difference between both of the two multisource priming modes under the other two combined contexts.4) Through regression analysis, the results indicate that forward looking information search and reference selection play a positive role in resource allocation ratio, which promotes decision makers to distribute more resources to the development of new products. Moreover, the behavior of planning does not have a significant main effect on the resource allocation ratio.Finally, the paper discussed the research results and theoretical implication, analyzed the possible research limitations, and put forward the future research direction.