Corporate environmental management and sustainable enterprise: the influence of information processing and decision styles

Research suggests that corporate environmental management and sustainability demand that managers can think systemically, integrate different facets of environment and business problems and support choices and collaborative action involving disparate partners. To learn more about how the decision styles of managers influenced managerial outcomes we used a theory and method of assessing decision styles, together with a complex simulation game. Theory characterizes five different decision making styles and addresses how managers deal with complexity when solving problems. It suggests managers with certain styles ‘interact and perform’ in predictable ways under given situations. In our empirical work, we presented a sample of managers with a common situation (a complex simulation game designed around the ‘greening of a specific industry’). We explored how different teams, selected on the basis of their patterns in decision-making style, ‘performed’ in the simulation. Our results show qualitatively different responses by teams with different patterns of decision-making style. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.