Fast-and-frugal trees as noncompensatory models of performance-based personnel decisions

Employees’ performance provides the basis for many personnel decisions, and to make these decisions, managers often need to integrate information from different performance-related cues. We asked college students and experienced managers to make a series of performance-based personnel decisions and tested how well weighting-and-adding, compensatory logistic regression and lexicographic, noncompensatory fast-and-frugal trees (FFTs) could describe participants’ decision processes regarding both choices and reaction times. Results show that a significant proportion of the participants (i.e., nearly half of the college students and more than two-thirds of the experienced managers) applied FFTs to make such decisions, and that the majority of them adopted key features of FFTs adaptively in response to a manipulation of the required distributions of positive (bonus) or negative (termination) decisions. Overall, the process-oriented approach applied in our study provides insights on not only what cues managers use for performance-based personnel decisions, but also how they use these cues.