In Lugano, should teams be asked to justify their decisions?
A team can achieve its target through weak reasoning, or miss it despite a defensible decision. The management question is therefore specific: should teams account only for their results, or also for how they reached their decisions?
What the literature establishes
Jennifer S. Lerner and Philip E. Tetlock (1999, Psychological Bulletin) show in a literature review that requiring people to justify their judgements does not consistently improve their quality. The effects depend, among other things, on when this requirement is announced and what people know about their audience's expectations. Accountability is therefore a condition shaping decisions, not a guarantee of sound reasoning.
Justifying the process rather than the result alone
Karen Siegel-Jacobs and J. Frank Yates (1996, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) experimentally distinguish accountability for the judgement procedure from accountability for its outcomes. Their findings support the relevance of this distinction: these requirements do not have equivalent effects on judgement quality. For a manager, asking “what information did you use?” is therefore not interchangeable with asking “did you meet the target?”.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that every team decision should come with a detailed justification. The review by Jennifer S. Lerner and Philip E. Tetlock (1999, Psychological Bulletin) instead encourages attention to the audience: when an evaluator's preferences are known, the exercise can encourage conformity with those preferences. A team that can defend the expected answer has not necessarily examined the alternatives more carefully. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
These studies primarily concern individual judgements and do not establish that a justification procedure improves the performance of a workplace team. Applying them requires particular attention to the documentation burden and the risk of retrospective rationalisation. A record written after the outcome is known cannot establish what the team actually knew when it decided.
A practical check in Lugano
Within SHR's “Performance d'équipe” programme, one application to test in Lugano is to select a category of recurring decisions: a banking case assessment, fashion stock replenishment, supplier selection in trading, or a commercial commitment in an Italian-speaking family business. Over a period defined in advance, before each decision the team records the information used, one rejected option and the criterion applied, in Italian if that is its working language. The main measure is the proportion of decisions with a record timestamped before commitment, supplemented by documentation time and the rate of decisions reopened because information already available had been omitted. Comparing these indicators with an initial baseline period can establish adoption and possible usefulness, without automatically attributing every change in performance to the procedure. To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Lugano in the canton of Ticino, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Team Performance in Lugano
- team performance
- Lugano
- research
- training lugano