Fast-and-frugal trees as noncompensatory models of performance-based personnel decisions

- Tests both fast-and-frugal trees (FFTs) and logistic regression as process models.
- Managers use noncompensatory FFTs to make performance-based personnel decisions.
- Managers apply FFTs adaptively in response to forced decision distributions.
- FFTs can be applied to model a variety of managerial decisions.
- Comparative model testing allows new insights on managerial decision processes.

Employees' performance provides the basis for many personnel decisions, and to make these decisions, managers often need to integrate information from different performance-related cues. We asked college students and experienced managers to make a series of performance-based personnel decisions and tested how well weighting-and-adding, compensatory logistic regression and lexicographic, noncompensatory fast-and-frugal trees (FFTs) could describe participants' decision processes regarding both choices and reaction times. Results show that a significant proportion of the participants (i.e., nearly half of the college students and more than two-thirds of the experienced managers) applied FFTs to make such decisions, and that the majority of them adopted key features of FFTs adaptively in response to a manipulation of the required distributions of positive (bonus) or negative (termination) decisions. Overall, the process-oriented approach applied in our study provides insights on not only what cues managers use for performance-based personnel decisions, but also how they use these cues.