Decision-making in a dynamic task: effects of goal orientation on stocks and flows performance

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the effects of goal orientation on understanding the dynamics of stocks and flows (SF).

Design/methodology/approach: The authors use the well-established department store task as the experimental task to evaluate people’s understanding of SF and implement a survey to assess different goal orientation levels. Ordinary least square is used to test the effects of goal orientations on the SF performance.

Findings: The findings suggest that learning goal orientation is positively associated with SF performance. However, prove and avoid performance goal orientation are unrelated to SF performance.

Originality/value: The study has important theoretical and practical contributions. From a theoretical perspective, the authors examine the impact of goal orientation in dynamic decision-making to advance the knowledge on the role of goal orientation. Practically, the research demonstrates that learning-goal-oriented people perform better in stock and flow tasks, suggesting that goal orientation is an important trait for recruiting organizational members whose work involves SF decision-making tasks.