Human Factors Affecting a Strategic Marketing Decision: An Experimental Research Design

In today’s fast-paced and complex world, managers are faced with important strategic decisions. Existing studies confirm five key human characteristics that are related to the quality of strategic decision making: intellect, intelligence, cognitive ability, personality and experience. So far, however, these factors have only been studied in isolation due to the lack of an overarching experimental design. This study is the first to attempt a complete experimental design that covers all factors and thus enables the interactions to be investigated. The effectiveness of the experimental design is confirmed with a test sample of 20 participants with different levels of experience in strategic decision making. The evaluation of the test participants reveals initial indications of correlations between the individual dimensions that have not yet been researched. The experimental design thus provides a complete picture of human performance in strategic decision making. For the first time, it is possible to examine all dimensions in a single experimental design. In addition, the test setup provides a completely new general and domain knowledge test. Practical implications include the derivation of evaluation criteria for predicting or evaluating the strategic performance of managers.