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Cognitive Style Diversity In Decision Making Teams, Abby Lynn Mello

Doctoral Dissertations

Rational and intuitive cognitive styles represent two typical manners of acquiring, organizing, and processing information. Rational style is data-driven, slow, and detailed. Intuitive style is feelings-driven, fast, and global. People have a stable preference for one style over the other and style underlies such processes as decision making (Leonard, Scholl, & Kowalski, 1999). The present study took the perspective that cognitive style is an individual difference upon which members of a decision making team may vary and that diversity in cognitive style is related to team processes and outcomes. Specifically, it was hypothesized that diversity in cognitive style would increase …