مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله تحقیقات بازاریابی – Journal of Business Research

Many organizations, including banks, commonly provide their stakeholders with mission and vision statements, as well as outlines of organizational goals. There are well-documented theoretical benefits to doing so (Barney & Hesterley, 2012; Grant, 2013); however, in practice, these statements and institutional objectives are often vague or even unrealistic. Clarifying values and vision, making objectives explicit, and aligning these elements with ethical principles is crucial for business survival, but constitutes a notoriously complex and difficult endeavor (Buttle, 2007).

In this regard, a relatively new and exciting field of collaboration is between ethics and neural sciences (i.e., disciplines related to human cognition, perception, memory, categorization, and problem solving) (cf. Anderson, 1997; Ferreira, Jalali, & Ferreira, 2016). This collaboration is helping strategic thinkers to recognize the importance of values in the definition of well-structured goals and objectives, as well as in the pursuit of good decisions. Indeed, as Grinyer (2000) notes, “there is a continuing need for senior managers to develop coherent, well articulated cognitive structures, or mental models, which adequately map the key aspects of their business and its environment” (p. 51).

Keeney (1996) proposes a practical way to approach the creation of such models through what he terms “value-focused thinking”. Based on the premise that values should be both “the driving force for our decision making”, and “the basis for the time and effort we spend thinking about decisions” (p. 537), value-focused thinking proposes a set of concepts and procedures which place values at the heart of decision making situations. These concepts span from the identification of objectives to the creation of better alternatives and, even further, to the “identification of better decision situations” (i.e., decision opportunities rather than problems) (Keeney, 1996, p. 358).