Real executives frequently make management decisions within highly complex
working environments that may simultaneously affect many functions and disciplines within
the organisation. However, management education in universities has frequently involved segregating areas of business in order to concentrate on narrow subject areas for intense analysis. Whilst a valuable and effective means of studying subjects in detail, management education and qualifications that are based upon concentrated attention to single subjects in isolation, denies the true nature of managing real businesses. Also, some managers make good decisions in complex environments, others do not.

One solution is to provide management students with appropriately realistic and complex organisational simulations where they can experiment with alternative decision strategies, reflect upon the outcomes, and learn from the consequences of their decisions. In order to develop simulated organisations for use in management education, this study investigated relationships between managers’ individual information processing and their decision-making performance within environments of varying complexity. The research design included examination of these relationships for subject managers using a series of well-established computerised instruments.

A sample of Public Sector managers made decisions within different levels of complexity to simulate the range of challenging situations at work. Their decision-making performance and individual information processing capability was analysed to discover any relationships. Results provided some evidence that decision-making performance of Public Sector managers was significantly different, at similar levels of environmental complexity, from previous samples of private sector managers.

The results of this study highlighted a need for simulations to be programmed to accommodate differences in managerial context amongst private, government and NGO sectors. The lack of subjects’ feedback and its subsequent qualitative analysis was identified as being a limitation of this study. A need for further research was identified to establish performance benchmarks and design parameters to simulate a series of alternative and multiple organisational cultures.

Keywords: business education - management-psychology - curriculum design