This paper presents a field study of decision-making processes in management teams in two organizations. It reviews existing literature on managerial knowledge structures and decision-making, and identifies methodological and conceptual limitations with these approaches. The authors then develop interpretive case studies of two management teams, which focus on the articulated and social methods used to make decisions. They found that both organizations used rules of thumb or heuristic reasoning in their decision-making, that these rules of thumb functioned as headlines of deeper organizational narratives, and that these narratives were grounded in emotional as well as purely rational considerations. We suggest that the term “guiding principle ” usefully integrates our three findings into a descriptive concept that may be further explored in future research of both a descriptive and prescriptive nature.

Though it is widely acknowledged that both organisational learning and the purchasing of IT products are important areas for study, it is surprising to find that very little research has explicitly linked these two areas together. As a result, the key reason for undertaking this research is to begin to address this gap in the literature by developing a model which is based on a review of the extensive literature on organisational buying behaviour, organisational information search, and organisational learning. In addition, a key contribution of this research is to model the effects that outside IT consultants are likely to have on the processes of information search and organisational learning in firms purchasing this type of product.