THE INTERPERSONAL STRUCTURE OF DECISION-MAKING - A SOCIAL-COMPARISON APPROACH TO ORGANIZATIONAL CHOICE

Under what circumstances does social information affect choices? A recent test of social information processing theory showed little effect of anonymous social cues on choices of brief tasks (Kilduff & Regan, 1988). But from the perspective of social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) people faced with important and ambiguous decisions, such as the choice of an organization to work for, are likely to make their choices in the context of what others perceived to be similar to themselves are doing. For a cohort of MBA students, the relationships between patterns of social ties and patterns of interviews with recruiting organizations were analyzed. The results showed that students who perceived each other as similar, or who considered each other to be personal friends, tended to interview with the same organizations. These correlations remained significant even controlling for similarities in job preferences and similarities in academic concentrations. The research places the individual decision maker in a social context often ignored by normative approaches such as expectancy theory. © 1990.