This study aims to investigate Peter Drucker’s viewpoints on decision-making, interpreting them in light of his own historical development and the broader mainstream strategic decision-making literature. To this goal, the authors evaluate the evolution of Drucker’s views on decision-making over his career and assess his work alongside that of fellow management theorists Chester Barnard and Herbert Simon.
The authors conducted a qualitative study that combined a thematic analysis of his writings on decision-making with a historical evaluation of his work. To do so, the authors collected the machine-readable text versions of all Drucker books and used Python to identify and extract all the sentences in which Drucker used the word “decision.” The authors then used Gioia’s method to identify concepts, themes and dimensions before discussing them in their proper historical context.
Like much of the existing work on decision-making, Drucker’s writing on the subject takes up the role of rationality and intuition. However, the synthesis shows that his work explicitly addresses matters of ethics, execution and human factors as important parts of the process of decision-making. When putting together the themes and dimensions that emerged in the work and comparing Drucker’s ideas to those of Barnard and Simon, it is evident that Drucker takes a balanced approach to the decision process that pays attention to both the role of the individual and organizations in making decisions. This approach is consistent with Drucker’s overarching project of a functioning free society where individuals have dignity, purpose and meaning within a larger structure of rationally managed organizations. Drucker’s model of decision-making allows room for human expression and individuality while operating within an environment of responsible authority and rational process.
The work highlights how Drucker’s explicit treatment of implementation, ethics and human nature within decision-making process is essential for a more complete understanding of how decisions are made. This is important for the current literature on strategic decision-making that often treats “decision-making process” as a distinct research stream, largely disconnected from related bodies of work on decision implementation and ethical decision-making. The work also contributes to the historical understanding of management writing on decision-making by contextualizing the way Drucker placed the individual at the center of organizational decision-making, balancing the need for organizational rationality with individual expression. This represents Drucker’s unique contribution to this literature.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is among the first that evaluates Drucker’s work on decision-making in the context of history – both in terms of his own thought evolution and how his thinking differs from the theories of Barnard and Simon. By doing so, it contributes to the historical understanding of management writing on decision-making and contemporary discussions surrounding the practice and theory of the decision-making-process.
