Establishment and Stability of Information Aggregation Routines: The Case of Performance Evaluations

Actors establish decision routines to simplify and speed up decision-making in repeated tasks. The notion of stable decision routines is implicit in many strands of behavioral research on managerial decision-making, notably tasks involving the aggregation of information. It is presumed that actors adhere to their decision routines, particularly in the short run. However, the validity of this assumption has not been tested. Using performance evaluation as an example and statistical models to reconstruct actors’ decision routines, this paper investigates how such routines are established, what they look like, and how persistent they are. We also inquire into the relevance of personal features of the evaluator in this process. Our findings offer insight into a contradiction underlying research on managerial decision routines. Prima facie, evidence indicates that decisions can seemingly be successfully reconstructed using simple routines—often oriented toward the linear-additive evaluation model underlying school grades. This is indicative of stable routines, which form the basis of meaningful research, for example on biases in decision-making, as well as of managerial practices such as indicator-based performance evaluations. However, contrary to the implicit assumption of stable routines, we find that despite the high explanatory power of decision models, decision routines are not stable, even when performing a task such as performance evaluation repeatedly. Implications for managerial decision-making and research on biases in recurrent decisions are discussed.