Management Information Systems: The Challenge to Rationality and Emotionality

If management information systems achieve their designers' highest levels of aspiration, they will tend to create conditions where executives will experience (1) reduction of space of free movement, (2) psychological failure and double bind, (3) leadership based more on competence than formal power, and (4) decreased feelings of essentiality. These experiences will tend to create genuine resistance to MIS. MIS specialists, in turn, are not presently equipped to cope with the emotional problems caused by their systems. They react over rationally, which is an emotional response, and have difficulty in coping with their own and the executives' feelings and behavior.