Self-Leadership in Purpose-Driven Organizations: Analyzing Human Perception for More Integrated Decision-Making

Abstract

Productive decision-making requires appropriate perception of the facts relevant to the decision. It may be necessary to perceive and integrate diverse and conflicting perspectives appearing inside and outside of the decision-maker. Therefore I scrutinize theoretical and empirical findings on individual human perception as a basis for decision-making and behavior. Special attention lies on the role of the unconscious (e.g. Bargh, 2006), dual-system approaches (e.g. Kahneman & Frederick, 2002), self-regulation (e.g. Muraven, Baumeister & Tice, 1999, Moffitt et al., 2011), and self-leadership (e.g. Manz, 2013). From this foundation I derive guiding self-leadership guidelines for more sustainable internal balancing and more comprehensive integration of external stimuli. Such self-leadership guidelines allow leaders and organizations to identify blind spots more easily and to improve the perception of the inside and the environment. In purpose-driven organizations with distributed authority, the power to decide is distributed among those employees who appear to be competent for the specific topic. Therefore especially within such organizations this self-leadership competency appears to be crucial for success.

Keywords: Leadership, Self-Leadership, Perception, Psychology

JEL Classification: D80