Behavioral assumptions and management ability

Benito Arruñada and Xosé Vázquez ()

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: The paper explores the consequences that relying on different behavioral assumptions in training managers may have on their future performance. We argue that training with an emphasis on the standard assumptions used in economics (rationality and self-interest) is good for technical posts but may also lead future managers to rely excessively on rational and explicit safeguarding, crowding out instinctive relational heuristics and signaling a “bad” human type to potential partners. In contrast, human assumptions used in management theories, because of their diverse, implicit and even contradictory nature, do not conflict with the innate set of cooperative tools and may provide a good training ground for such tools. We present tentative confirmatory evidence by examining how the weight given to behavioral assumptions in the core courses of the top 100 business schools influences the average salaries of their MBA graduates. Controlling for the self-selected average quality of their students and some other schools’ characteristics, average salaries are seen to be significantly greater for schools whose core MBA courses contain a higher proportion of management courses as opposed to courses based on economics or technical disciplines.

Keywords: Evolutionary psychology; economics; management; relational heuristics; rationality; self-interest. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A23 B41 D01 D87 M12 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-06, Revised 2010-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-edu, nep-evo and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1157.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Behavioral Assumptions and Management Ability (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1157

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).