Intuition or Marketing Research Information Usefulness in Business Organizations in the Light of Ordinal Regression Analysis

Abstract

This article refers to theory of decisions investigating the extent of intuition vs. information use by managers and top executives, as two contrasting sources influencing their decisions. In the first part of article, the most significant assumptions underlying theory of decision making processes were described, and then the empirical results regarding the manager’s preferences between intuition and information in context of decision behaviors were discussed. The author argues that decision makers in business organizations, in complex situations are more inclined towards the intuitive way of thinking, than analytical and logical reasoning supported by the marketing research information. In particular, top executives due to required effort in reviewing the stats derived from the research, perceive the information as useless in decision making. This preference causes serious problems, because managers unconsciously lose the information potential, simultaneously neglecting t he marketing research. The results of empirical study were collected on the basis of the internet questionnaire survey. The process of choosing the respondents to sample was conducted in Poland with the use of the two techniques: judgmental and snowball sampling. In this process, the data from two social networking sites, i.e. LinkedIn and Golden Line was applied. The final sample size equaled N = 391 and included mainly decision makers in companies.

Keywords

• intuition
• information
• marketing research
• managers
• business organization
• ordinal regression analysis