The effects of time pressure on decision making: how harassed managers cope

Naturalistic decision research has demonstrated the importance of studying human decision making in the everyday world highlighting, in particular, features that constrain the decision-making process. One of these constraints, time pressure, is the focus of the present paper. We draw on laboratory research to formulate a number of research questions, but report an investigation which is naturalistic in approach. This illustrates our belief that not only is it appropriate to bring the two approaches together, but fruitful to undertake research drawing on both. The findings indicate that time pressure affects decision making in many different ways. Whilst some decision makers feel more pressured, that they expended more energy and that they made a less effective decision based on an inferior decision process, this was not true in all cases. Some of our respondents highlighted the beneficial effects of time pressure indicating that it improved both the quality of the underlying process and the decision overall.