The Relationships Between Power And Decision-Making Style

Recently, psychology studies showed power is not only the basic attribute that standardize social and organizational relationships but also a crucial psychological attributes, which made researchers pay much attention to how power affect the individual’s cognition, emotion and behavior. Now foreign and domestic researchers included power concept into the field of decision making. This present paper aimed at using questionnaire method to investigate the relationship between the individuals’ general sense of power and their decision making style. Study 1 tested the applicability of Melbourne decision-making questionnaire in China; Study 2 used Chinese version of Melbourne decision-making questionnaire and general power questionnaire to explore the relationship between individuals’ general sense of power and their decision coping style; Study 3 further adopted general decision-making style questionnaire to examine the relationship between power and decision-making style.Study 1 investigated the applicability of Melbourne decision-making questionnaire in China. Reliability and validity test on the Chinese version of Melbourne decision-making questionnaire revealed that The inter-item consistency(Cronbach’s α) of vigilance, hypervigilance, procrastination and buck passing were between 0.642~0.764, the test-retest reliability after 2 weeks were 0.537~0.785. From the results of confirmatory factor analysis, the 4 dimensions of Melbourne DMQ had satisfying structure validity. The correlation between vigilance and positive coping dimension was 0.436. The relationship between hypervigilance, procrastination, buck passing and negative coping style were 0.405, 0.335, and 0.308. Study 2 used the Chinese version Melbourne decision-making and the general power questionnaire to explore the relationships between individuals’ decision coping style and their sense of power. The results indicated the coefficients of correlation between power and vigilance, hypervigilance, procrastination and buck passing were 0.206,-0.351,-0.302,-0.198. Study 3 revealed that the coefficients of correlation between power level and rationality, intuition, dependency, avoidance, spontaneous were 0.527,-0.319,-0.435,-0.421.The above results showed that individuals’ power was related with their decision style. The powerful individuals tend to solve decision problems in a vigilant and rational way, instead of hypervigilance, procrastination, buck passing, intuitive-spontaneous, dependent and avoidant decision style.