Fundamental insights from neuroscience findings for understanding managerial decision-making

EXTENDED ABSTRACT
 
Introduction: Describing decision making and choice has been one of the main areas of research for neuroscientists in the last few decades. Neuromanagement and neuroleadership sciences have expanded in parallel with the development of cognitive sciences. Neuromanagement has made a connection between the fields of management, leadership and psychology and neuroscience. Today, management and leadership, psychology, and neuroscience have converged into a unified discipline with the ultimate goal of providing a unified and comprehensive theory of human behavior. Researchers in the fields of economics, management, leadership, and psychologists provide rich conceptual tools for understanding and modeling behavior, while neurobiologists provide tools for studying mechanisms. Therefore, the goal of this discipline is to understand the processes that link sensation and action by revealing the neurobiological mechanisms by which decisions are made. This research tries to investigate the potential contribution of neuroscience in the knowledge of management, leadership and entrepreneurship by researching the theoretical, methodological and experimental potential of neuroscience analyzes in management and decision-making research. Since most of the articles in this field have introduced the fields of neuromanagement, neuroscienceleadership, neuromarketing, etc., and less have entered into the decision-making mechanism and its applications. In this research, the decision-making mechanism from three aspects of neurochemistry, bioelectricity and it has been studied psychologically. In addition, in this research, an attempt has been made to provide a model based on the findings of neuroscience to understand the decision-making mechanism and its relationship with the related issues of the organization by systematically reviewing all the articles of recent years in this field.
Methodology: The current research is qualitative and meta-synthesis and applied-fundamental in terms of purpose, descriptive in nature and exploratory in terms of research type. The data used in the research are secondary and library data. In order to answer the questions of this research, a systematic literature review of 43 articles in this field, which were published in the period of 2010 to 2023 and were selected through a detailed screening and exclusion sampling process, was used. In order to standardize and maintain the transparency and quality of the review process, we also used Sandelowski and Barroso's method, which is an accepted seven-step standard method and structured model for qualitative text analysis and extracting concepts, as well as a practical method for meta-synthesis research.
Discussion and Results: By analyzing 239 open codes extracted from the articles, 16 concepts related to the study topic emerged, which shows the researchers' focus on the study of four categories of decision-making mechanism and the impact of decision-making in neuroleadership, neuroentrepreneurship, and neuromanagement. To understand the decision-making mechanism, five platforms; Neurochemistry, cognitive bias, brain structure and anatomy, brain waves and emotion should be studied with the help of measurement tools such as EEG and FMRI. And if necessary, influenced them with appropriate methods so that the brain functions optimally at the time of decision making.     Correct decisions by managers, leaders and entrepreneurs at the right time are the key to developing organizations for more productivity, increasing profitability and producing better quality workforce. In fact, by controlling and directing the category of decision-making mechanism through the five platforms that were mentioned, it is possible to influence the decision-making of the three categories of neuroleadership, neuromanagement and neuroentrepreneurship. Also, having knowledge in this field and using this knowledge can enable managers and leaders to develop a healthier organizational culture and manage their organizations better. Other applications of neuroscience can be the appropriate selection of people based on their testosterone levels or morphology for any job or even the decision to invest in companies. Today, the techniques used in neuroscience such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography are also used in hiring suitable personnel for important and vital jobs such as financial management and executive director of companies in some organizations.
Conclusion: Decision making is a universal phenomenon in real life and an important part of management. The decision-making ability of managers and professional leaders is related to the success of companies. This study has analyzed and summarized the decision-making mechanism and various factors that affect decision-making ability by systematic literature reviewing of recent management, leadership and entrepreneurship research in the field of decision-making, which conducted their research based on the findings of neuroscience. In recent years, researchers' ability to directly observe brain activity has greatly increased. There are various techniques for measuring brain activity that vary in terms of cost, accuracy, impact on subjects studied, complexity, and time. Therefore, it is technically possible to measure brain activity in management experiments. The decision-making mechanism has also been studied from the aspect of neurochemistry. However, these studies have received less attention and investigation than other aspects of decision-making mechanism studies, such as anatomy and physiology of the brain or cognitive neuroscience and biases. But with the help of the same few studies, we now know that the prominent hormones influencing decision-making and guiding our behavior are oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, cortisol, testosterone, and endorphins. And of course, based on the results of research, the role of dopamine and serotonin in decision-making is more prominent. Getting to know the mechanism of decision-making and understanding how the brain works helps us to make better choices and make more correct decisions. Also, having knowledge in this field and using the knowledge of neuroscience in the leadership and management of the organization will probably cause more productivity. Despite many researches and findings about brain activity and neuroscience, it seems that there are still many obscure points that need to be discovered. Although we now have a lot of information about the decision-making mechanism, we still cannot produce a formula for making a decision or manipulate it and consider it the best decision with certainty and confidence. But having knowledge in this field and understanding how we make decisions, makes us manage the factors affecting it as much as possible.