Successful Managers - Rational or Irrational

It is fairly common to hear senior managers make statements about their ability to identify a competent person with just one look. It would appear that these managers are taking critical decisions without adequate analysis. Any decision-making situation requires a definition of the problem, identification of criteria, assignment of accurate weightage to criteria according to preferences, knowledge of the alternatives, assessment of each alternative based on the criteria, and finally, choosing of the alternative with the highest value.
This process of decision-making is called rational and is expected to lead to optimal results. Yet, in the everyday life of a manager, it appears that decisions are taken without such an elaborate process. The practice of management seems to present a seemingly non-rational process of decision-making. By studying such real life practices of decision-makers, researchers identified the real world phenomena of bounded rationality of managers in making deci...