Aspects of Cognitive Competence and Managerial Behaviour

We present arguments for viewing decision making by managers in the context of both cognitive psychology and neuropsychology of planning. Individual differences in managerial decision making are explained within the framework of a model of cognitive processes that has for its components planning, attention, information coding and knowledge-base. But all decision making are influenced by irrational factors contained in motivation and emotions and the failures of logic. The conditions under which these failures occur are discussed. Next we consider if strategies for good planning can be learned and recommend inductive rather than deductive rule-learning procedures. In our Concluding Remarks we discuss this further and in the Appendix we have provided a list of strategies that can be taught inductively through structuring the executive’s experience.