Managerial Decision Comprehensiveness during the COVID-19 Jolt: Environmental Hostility/ Munificence and Manager Ownership Status

We investigate the relationship of decision-making comprehensiveness to environmental changes caused by COVID-19, and managers’ company ownership status. The environmental change effect we consider is if and how industry hostility or munificence affected decision comprehensiveness. The manager ownership status effects we consider are whether owner-managers compared with executive managers show more comprehensive decision analyses. We test our hypotheses with survey data combined with industry statistics from 1,217 managers in two transition economies, Estonia and Bulgaria, between December 2020 and August 2021. The findings show that industry hostility versus munificence had no significant effect on decision comprehensiveness. Owner-managers, however, were significantly less comprehensive than were executive managers in their decision-making suggesting that their expertise and power suppresses their decision-making comprehensiveness. With this study, we combine sources of guidance from event meaning management with decision-making comprehensiveness and observe the effect of environmental hostility from a large-scale natural experiment. In so doing, we also focus on under-researched transition economies.