Antecendents and effects of decision comprehensiveness: The role of decision quality and perceived uncertainty

•This paper investigates the roles of decision quality and perceived uncertainty in the comprehensiveness-performance link.•Our results show that decision quality mediates a large proportion of the comprehensiveness–performance relationship.•We find that perceived uncertainty directly affects comprehensiveness rather than moderating its performance effect.

On the basis of a sample of 184 top executives, we investigated the roles of decision quality and perceived uncertainty in the relationship between decision comprehensiveness and performance. Our results show that decision quality mediates a large proportion of the comprehensiveness–performance relationship and may thus provide a more proximate outcome measure of the effect of comprehensiveness. In addition, we found that perceived uncertainty directly affects the level of comprehensiveness in organizations rather than moderating its effect on performance as conceptualized by previous research. Based on the integration of behavioral and information processing theories we suggest that more process-oriented measures such as decision quality and perceived uncertainty may overcome conflicting empirical results in the field.