Michael A. Roberto

Uncovering hidden profiles: advocacy in team decision making

Purpose – Research shows that teams often fail to surface and use unique information to evaluate decision alternatives. Under a condition known as the hidden profile, each member uniquely possesses a critical clue needed to uncover the superior solution. Failure to share and adequately evaluate this information will result in poor decision quality. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of the devils advocacy technique on the decision quality of hidden profile teams.Design/methodology/approach – In order to mitigate this team decision‐making bias, the present study utilizes experimental research to examine the impact of the devils advocacy technique on the decision quality of hidden profile teams.Findings – Results show that devils advocacy groups achieved higher decision quality than groups under free discussion. However, devils advocacy teams also had higher levels of affective conflict. As a result, while they selected the best solution, devils advocacy introduced conditions that may hinde...

Do Persistence and Passion Matter: Evidence from the Educational Testing Service Major Field Test in Business.

ABSTRACT The authors examined the determinants of success on the Educational Testing Service Major Field Test in Business. The authors find that gender, SAT performance, and concentration are significant predictors of performance. Additionally, they derive proxies for student passion and persistence, and find that the greater the students passion for business is, the higher the score is. The authors discover that students who demonstrate persistence, as measured by the extent to which they outperform their grade point average expectations, also score higher on the exam.

Student Perceptions and Learning Outcomes: Evidence from the Education Testing Service (ETS) Major Field Test in Business

We examine course evaluation data from the core finance course and analyze how these data relate to performance on the finance portion of the Educational Testing Service Major Field Test in Business (ETS). We find that gender, SAT scores, GPA and concentration all have significant impacts on student performance. We also find that student perceptions of teaching and of how much knowledge they gained do not relate to the finance ETS score. Finally, we find that students who feel challenged in their finance core course do significantly better on the finance portion of the exam. This result is robust to different data partitions.