Shanteau, 1984; Langer, 1975; Means, Salas, Crandall, & Jacobs, 1993; Melone,
1994). Furthermore, there are grounds for believing that managers are unlikely to
adopt a purely rational decision process.
For example, Simon’s (1947) original work examining the “bounded rationality”
of human decision making was carried out within a managerial context. Simon
argued that managers frequently use a “satisficing” strategy, in which they limit
their information search to produce a decision that is “good enough” to satisfy the
decision maker. These arguments suggest that rather than applying a prescriptive
model of the decision process, one should study in much more detail how managers
actually make promotion decisions in real organizations.