Decisões corporativas em grupo: Uma abordagem comportamental

Important organizational decisions are commonly made within groups. Within financial institutions, it is not rare for credit concessions to be decided by committees. In the government sphere, fundamental decisions, such as defining the economy’s primary interest rate, are also made in collegiate. In large private companies, the board of directors is at the top of the organizational hierarchy and has the final word on investment strategies, financing, and mergers and acquisitions. However, the peculiarities of the group decision process are widely ignored in finance literature, which usually considers the group as if it were an individual. For example, studies in the field of behavioral corporate finance emphasize the cognitive processes and biases of the individual decision maker, but pay little attention to how these processes interact to make a group decision (For a literature review, see Baker & Wurgler, 2013). In this essay, I present, in a concise, selective manner, the current state of the emerging multidisciplinary discussion on the decision process in small groups and emphasize its behavioral aspects. First, I cover the advantages and difficulties of the group decision compared with the individual decision. Then, I present recent contributions indicating that the quality of group decisions depends on the context and on how small changes in the decision environment can have important consequences.