The Impact of Age on the Perception of Cognitive Abilities and Decision-Making Skills

Nowadays organizations are operating in a dynamic and turbulent environment. In these conditions, the situations are very complex and the problems are unstructured. So, to make good decisions the organizations are moving toward group decision-making. The advantages of such processes are numerous when compared to individual decision-making. The main goal of the current research focuses on the perception of cognitive and decision-making abilities, trying to understand if there is a relationship between them and age and how such perceptions may influence the attitudes toward group decision-making process. This study focuses on the banking institutions in Albania, as the most developed segment of the financial system and the entire Albanian economy and as a sector where group decision-making processes are widely used. It is generally thought that adults are less productive, less motivated, more adverse to innovation and less skilled in learning. With the age, the individual undergoes substantial changes regarding the information processing speed, memory, reasoning, concentration and executive functions. It has been shown that these changes move in the opposite direction with respect to age. Then what to do, avoid that adults make decisions? The relationship between age, cognitive and decision-making abilities is very complex. Cognitive limits orient adults to the adoption of compensatory decision-making strategies. In these circumstances, the question that arises is whether the group decision-making process can be an effective tool to balance these skills. On the basis of the responses offered by 247 participants and adopting the quantitative methodology, the current research tries to answer this question.