Marcus Selart

Norwegian School of Economics
  •  19
    Ethical Decision-Making and Leadership Stress
    In Deborah C. Poff & Alex C. Michalos (eds.), Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics, Springer Verlag. pp. 708-710. 2021.
    This article addresses the relationship between ethical decision-making and leadership stress, highlighting how stress can negatively impact leaders' cognitive processes and decision-making abilities. Prior to this work, it was understood that stress often leads to errors and biases in ethical decision-making, but the authors also note that some leaders develop stress tolerance that can mitigate these effects. The authors review existing literature and present a nuanced view, suggesting that whi…Read more
  •  4218
    A Leadership Perspective on Decision Making (edited book)
    Cappelen Academic Publishers. 2010.
    This book is concerned with helping you improve your approach to decision-making. The author examines judgement in a selection of managerial contexts and provides important understanding that can help you make better leadership decisions. The book also pinpoints the in-house politics of organisational decision-making. Drawing on the very latest research, it introduces practical techniques that show you how to analyse and develop your own decision-making style. It will help you to deliver sharp a…Read more
  •  992
    Decision processes in organizations
    In A Leadership Perspective on Decision Making, Cappelen Academic Publishers. pp. 17-43. 2010.
    In this chapter, it is demonstrated that the concepts of leadership and organization are closely linked. A leader should initially get to know the organizational culture as well as possible. Such a culture can for example be authoritarian and conformist or innovative and progressive in nature. The assumption is that leaders are influenced by their own culture. Strategic decisions are characterized by the fact that they are new, complex and open in nature, and being able to develop a strategy is …Read more
  •  1547
    Developing as a leader and decison maker
    In A Leadership Perspective on Decision Making, Cappelen Academic Publishers. pp. 147-176. 2010.
    This chapter makes it clear that a significant element of both leadership and decision making is the development aspect. Leaders develop in their decision making by being confronted with difficult decision situations. However, they also develop through various forms of systemized training and education. Different leaders tend to develop in different directions. For this reason, one can identify a number of key leadership styles based on different ways of leading. These different styles are appro…Read more
  •  860
    Analyzing leadership decisions
    In A Leadership Perspective on Decision Making, Cappelen Academic Publishers. pp. 47-70. 2010.
    In this chapter it is pointed out that leaders who make decisions normally rely on both their intuition and their analytical thinking. Modern research shows that intuitive thinking has the potential to support the analytical, if used properly. Leaders must therefore be aware of the possibilities and limitations of intuition. Fresh thinking and innovation are key elements in leadership analysis, thus creative problem-solving is an important complement to traditional leadership thinking. Creative …Read more
  •  789
    Facilitating leadership decisions
    In A Leadership Perspective on Decision Making, Cappelen Academic Publishers. pp. 73-94. 2010.
    This chapter illustrates that in order to reach a decision a leader must decide which persons should be involved in the process and when. A relatively common method of involving others is delegating the decision to a group. A main objective of this is often to generate as many innovative ideas as possible, and different techniques can be employed for this, including brainstorming. The proposal generated must then be validated by the group using different criteria on the basis of which it is then…Read more
  •  1134
    Structuring the decision process
    In A Leadership Perspective on Decision Making, Cappelen Academic Publishers. pp. 97-120. 2010.
    This chapter includes a discussion of leadership decisions and stress. Many leaders are daily exposed to stress when they must make decisions, and there are often social reasons for this. Social standards suggest that a leader must be proactive and make decisions and not flee the situation. Conflict often creates stress in decision-making situations. It is important for leaders to understand that it is not stress in itself that leads to bad decisions, rather, bad decisions may be the result of t…Read more
  •  1046
    Implementing leadership decisions
    In A Leadership Perspective on Decision Making, Cappelen Academic Publishers. pp. 123-143. 2010.
    In this chapter it is demonstrated that the way in which leaders implement a decision largely depends on the nature of it, that is, whether it is strategic or not. Leaders must be as open as possible and not withhold information from the persons involved in the process. Therefore, they should distribute as much relevant information as possible to meeting participants before a meeting. At the same time, they must be able to steer the process. It is not unusual for there to be a separation between…Read more
  •  866
    Contingency and value in social decision making
    with Daniel Eek
    In Peter Juslin & Henry Montgomery (eds.), Judgment and Decision Making: Neo-Brunswikian and Process-Tracing Approaches, Erlbaum. pp. 261-273. 1999.
    This chapter discusses different perspectives and trends in social decision making, especially the actual processes used by humans when they make decisions in their everyday lives or in business situations. The chapter uses cognitive psychological techniques to break down these processes and set them in their social context. Most of our decisions are made in a social context and are therefore influenced by other people. If you are at an auction and bidding on a popular item, you will try to gue…Read more
  •  935
    When emotional intelligence affects peoples' perception of trustworthiness
    with Wing-Shing Lee
    Open Psychology Journal 8 160-170. 2015.
    By adopting social exchange theory and the affect-infusion-model, the hypothesis is made that emotional intelligence (EI) will have an impact on three perceptions of trustworthiness – ability, integrity and benevolence – at the beginning of a relationship. It was also hypothesized that additional information would gradually displace EI in forming the above perceptions. The results reveal that EI initially does not contribute to any of the perceptions of trustworthiness. As more information is re…Read more
  •  1167
    Reasoning about outcome probabilities and values in preference reversals
    with Ole Boe and Tommy Garling
    Thinking and Reasoning 5 (2). 1999.
    Research on preference reversals has demonstrated a disproportionate influence of outcome probability on choices between monetary gambles. The aim was to investigate the hypothesis that this is a prominence effect originally demonstrated for riskless choice. Another aim was to test the structure compatibility hypothesis as an explanation of the effect. The hypothesis implies that probability should be the prominent attribute when compared with value attributes both in a choice and a preference r…Read more
  •  1183
    The effects of risk on initial trust formation
    with Svein Tvedt Johansen and Kjell Grønhaug
    Journal of Applied Social Psychology 43 1185-1199. 2013.
    This paper seeks to expand our understanding of initial trust by looking at how variation in risk influences the nature of trust and the process of initial trust formation. Four hypotheses were tested in two experiments involving participants with and without work experience. A first hypothesis suggested a positive relationship between a general propensity to trust and initial trust; a second hypothesis, a negative relationship between risk and initial trust; whereas a third hypothesis posited t…Read more
  •  2608
    Purpose – The study aims at clarifying whether locus of control may act as a bias in organisational decision-making or not. Design/methodology/approach – Altogether 44 managers working at Skanska (a Swedish multinational construction company) participated in the study. They were asked to complete a booklet including a locus of control test and a couple of decision tasks. The latter were based on case scenarios reflecting strategic issues relevant for consultative/participative decision-making. …Read more
  •  1300
    Social and creative decision making
    with Carl Martin Allwood
    In Carl Martin Allwood & Marcus Selart (eds.), Decision making: Social and creative dimensions, Springer Verlag. 2001.
    Research on human decision making is at the present time undergoing rapid changes. From previously being much focused on models and approaches with an origin in economy, much of the present day research finds its inspiration from disciplinary approaches concerned with incorporating more of the context that the decision making takes place in. This context includes psychological aspects of the decision maker and social-cultural aspects of the situation he or she acts in. All human decision making …Read more
  •  620
    Is there a pro-self component behind the prominence effect?
    with Daniel Eek
    International Journal of Psychology 40 429-440. 2005.
    An important problem for decision-makers in society deals with the efficient and equitable allocation of scarce resources to individuals and groups. The significance of this problem is rapidly growing since there is a rising demand for scarce resources all over the world. Such resource dilemmas belong to a conceptually broader class of situations known as social dilemmas. In this type of dilemma, individual choices that appear ‘‘rational’’ often result in suboptimal group outcomes. In this artic…Read more
  •  1073
    The judgment-choice discrepancy
    with Henry Montgomery, Tommy Gärling, and Erik Lindberg
    Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 7 (2): 145-155. 1994.
    The study examines the relative merits of a noncompatibility and a restructuring explanation of the recurrent empirical finding that a prominent attribute looms larger in choices than in judgments. Pairs of equally attractive options were presented to 72 undergraduates who were assigned to six conditions in which they performed (1) only preference judgments or choices, (2) preference judgments or choices preceded by judgments of attractiveness of attribute levels, or (3) preference judgments or …Read more
  •  963
    How betrayal affects emotions and subsequent trust
    with Wing-Shing Lee
    Open Psychology Journal 8 153-159. 2015.
    This article investigates the impact of different emotions on trust decisions taking into account the experience of betrayal. Thus, an experiment was created that included one betrayal group and one control group. Participants in the betrayal group experienced more intense feelings governed by negative emotions than participants in the control group did. Moreover, participants in the betrayal group significantly lowered their trust of another stranger. On the other hand, we found some evidence t…Read more
  •  288
    In two experimental studies we explore to what extent the general effects of positive and negative framing also apply to positive and negative persuasion. Our results reveal that negative persuasion induces substantially higher levels of skepticism and awareness of being subjected to a persuasion attempt. Furthermore, we demonstrate that in positive persuasion, more claims lead to stronger persuasion, while in negative persuasion, the numerosity of claims carries no significant effect. We interp…Read more
  •  973
    The role of mental accounting in everyday economic decision making
    with Tommy Gärling and Niklas Karlsson
    In Peter Juslin & Henry Montgomery (eds.), Judgment and Decision Making: Neo-Brunswikian and Process-Tracing Approaches, Erlbaum. pp. 199-218. 1999.
    Mental accounting is a concept associated with the work of Richard Thaler. According to Thaler, people think of value in relative rather than absolute terms. They derive pleasure not just from an object’s value, but also the quality of the deal – its transaction utility (Thaler, 1985). In addition, humans often fail to fully consider opportunity costs (tradeoffs) and are susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy. Why are people willing to spend more when they pay with a credit card than cash (Prelec …Read more
  •  777
    The issue of design in managerial decision making
    Problems and Perspectives in Management 7 (4): 92-99. 2009.
    It is argued that the design of decisions is a process that in many ways is shaped by social factors such as identities, values, and influences. To be able to understand how these factors impact organizational decisions, the focus must be set on the management level. It is the management that shoulders the chief responsibility for designing collective actions, such as decisions. Our propositions indicate that the following measures must be taken in order to improve the quality of organizational …Read more
  •  1052
    Can intuitive and analytical decision styles explain managers' evaluation of information technology?
    with Svein Tvedt Johansen, Tore Holmesland, and Kjell Grønhaug
    Management Decision 46. 2008.
    Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to clarify how IT managers' decision styles affect their evaluation of information technology. Design/methodology/approach – Four different decision styles were assessed in a leadership test directed towards IT managers. Each style included two dimensions: confidence judgment ability and decision heuristic usage. Participants belonging to each style were interviewed and their answers analysed with regard to their reasoning about central areas of IT manageme…Read more
  •  1675
    Participation and organizational commitment during change: From utopist to realist perspectives
    with Rune Lines
    In Skipton Leonard, Rachel Lewis, Arthur Freedman & Jonathan Passmore (eds.), Handbook of the psychology of leadership, change, and organizational development, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 289-313. 2013.
    Trust has a great potential for furthering our understanding of organizational change and learning. This potential however remains largely untapped. It is argued that two reasons as for why this potential remains unrealized are: (i) A narrow conceptualization of change as implementation and (ii) an emphasis on direct and aggregated effects of individual trust to the exclusion of other effects. It is further suggested that our understanding of the effects of trust on organizational change, should…Read more
  •  683
    Explanations of effects of prior income changes on bying decisions
    with Niklas Karlsson and Tommy Gärling
    Journal of Economic Psychology 20 449-463. 1999.
    Two experiments with undergraduates as subjects tested explanations of how a prior temporary income change influences choices between buying and deferred buying. In Experiment 1 predictions from the behavioral life-cycle theory (Shefrin & Thaler, 1988), the renewable resources model (Linville & Fischer, 1991) and the loss-sensitivity principle (Garling & Romanus, 1997) were contrasted. The results are inconsistent with the latter two explanations since the framing of buying as positive (buying a…Read more
  •  1074
    Violations of procedure invariance in preference measurement: Cognitive explanations
    with Henry Montgomery, Joakim Romanus, and Tommy Gärling
    European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 6 417-435. 1994.
    A violation of procedure invariance in preference measurement is that the predominant or prominent attribute looms larger in choice than in a matching task. In Experiment 1, this so-called prominence effect was demonstrated for choices between pairs of options, choices to accept single options, and preference ratings of single options. That is, in all these response modes the prominent attribute loomed larger than in matching. The results were replicated in Experiment 2, in which subjects chose …Read more
  •  824
    The choice between allocation priciples
    with Daniel Eek
    International Journal of Psychology 44 (2): 109-119. 2009.
    One hundred and ninety participants (95 undergraduates and 95 employees) responded to a factorial survey in which a number of case-based organizational allocation tasks were described. Participants were asked to imagine themselves as employees in fictitious organizations and chose among three allocations of employee development schemes invested by the manager in different work groups. The allocations regarded how such investments should be allocated between two parties. Participants chose twice,…Read more
  •  1203
    Preference reversals in judgment and choice
    Gothenburg University Press. 1994.
    According to normative decision theory there exists a principle of procedure invariance which states that a decision maker's preference order should remain the same, independently of which response mode is used. For example, the decision maker should express the same preference independently of whether he or she has to judge or decide. Nevertheless, previous research in behavioral decision making has suggested that judgments and choices yield different preference orders in both the risky and the…Read more
  •  862
    Aspects of compatibility and the construction of preference
    In Rob Ranyard, Ray Crozier & Ola Svenson (eds.), Decision making: Cognitive models and explanations, Routledge. pp. 58-72. 1997.
    This chapter focuses on the psychological mechanisms behind the construction of preference, especially the actual processes used by humans when they make decisions in their everyday lives or in business situations. The chapter uses cognitive psychological techniques to break down these processes and set them in their social context. When attributes are compatible with the response scale, they are assigned greater weight because they are most easily mapped onto the response. For instance, when su…Read more
  •  826
    The impact of emotions on trust decisions
    with Wing-Shing Lee
    In Karen O. Moore & Nancy P. Gonzalez (eds.), Handboook on psychology of decision-making, Hauppage. pp. 1-14. 2012.
    Researchers have recognized that interpersonal trust consists of different dimensions. These dimensions suggest that trust can be rational, cognitive, or affective. Affect, which includes moods and emotions, is likely to have a direct impact on the affective dimension. On the other hand, there are also studies showing that affect indirectly influence cognitive judgments. Nonetheless, in this chapter we argue that the impact of affect on judgment will not be the same on all individuals. In effect…Read more
  •  3839
    Ethical Decision Making in Organizations: The Role of Leadership Stress
    with Svein Tvedt Johansen
    Journal of Business Ethics 99 (2). 2011.
    Across two studies the hypotheses were tested that stressful situations affect both leadership ethical acting and leaders' recognition of ethical dilemmas. In the studies, decision makers recruited from 3 sites of a Swedish multinational civil engineering company provided personal data on stressful situations, made ethical decisions, and answered to stress-outcome questions. Stressful situations were observed to have a greater impact on ethical acting than on the recognition of ethical dilemmas.…Read more
  •  1694
    Expanding the role of trust in the management of organizational change
    with Svein Tvedt Johansen
    In Rune Lines, Inger Stensaker & Ann Langley (eds.), New perspectives on organizational change and learning, Vigmostad & Bjørke. pp. 259-280. 2005.
    Trust has a great potential for furthering our understanding of organizational change and learning. This potential however remains largely untapped. It is argued that two reasons as for why this potential remains unrealized are: (i) A narrow conceptualization of change as implementation and (ii) an emphasis on direct and aggregated effects of individual trust to the exclusion of other effects. It is further suggested that our understanding of the effects of trust on organizational change, should…Read more