The Impact of Human Error Factors on Top Level Strategic Decision-Making : Evidence From the Mexican Steel Industry

The strategic decision-making process is a keystone for companies to maintain their competitive advantage and prevail in the future. The purpose of this work was to identify and understand human error factors in the strategic decision-making process that influence bias at executive levels of the Mexican steel industry. Identified factors include emotionality, cognitive complexity, decision timing, and context. There is little experimental evidence to validate the impact of human error factors in this type of strategic decision-making at top levels. This lack of research motivated our present work. During the first phase of this research, a qualitative exploratory study was performed on 11 top executives from the steel-making industry. The analysis of this information reveals that human error is present in strategic decision-making processes. Based on these results, variables were added to the model and the objective of the study was extended for the second phase