Strategic Decision Making: Empirical Findings from Croatia

A path one business organization will take, and where that path will lead, depends on a broad range of decisions made by managers in the managerial structure of an organization. Of course, the importance of all managerial decisions is not the same. Strategic decision making is a key organizational process, and strategic decisions are the most important decisions made in an organization. They deal with high-stake problems, and whose solutions have long-term implications. They target business areas essential for organizational growth, prosperity, and survival. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is a growing interest in this topic among researchers all over the world. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of strategic decision making by describing its main characteristics in a different context, namely in Croatia. After the list of twelve successfully implemented strategic decisions is created, the importance of different phases in decision making process, the level of decision making decentralization, decision makers’ attitude toward risk, and their tendency toward the use of decision making techniques and methods has been analyzed. Based on research results this paper reports the following empirical findings: in cases of successfully implemented strategic decisions the most important decision phase is intelligence phase ; lower levels decision makers are participating, in greater or lesser extent, in the activities during all decision making phases ; women have greater propensity towards risk when making decisions than men ; decision makers use different kind of decision making techniques and methods.