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How do organizational structures influence organizational decision making? This article reveals organizational structures’ dual function: they both (1) aggregate and (2) shape individuals’ decisions. What makes this dual function so remarkable is that the two effects are diametrically opposed to one another. Ceteris paribus, a less stringent decision-making structure reduces the amount of support required for a given project to be greenlit at the organizational level, which should result in more investments getting approved. However, we find that this ceteris paribus assumption does not hold, because a less stringent decision-making structure also reduces individuals’ tendency to provide their support for an investment. Our experimental investigation of organizational voting provides evidence for our position that organizational structure plays an important role beyond mere aggregation: voting thresholds also affect individuals’ voting behavior. The combination of both effects explains why the organizational adoption of a new voting threshold may not yield the intended outcome. Funding: This work was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award from the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences [Grant 1943688] granted to O. Schilke. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1653 .
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This content will become publicly available on April 28, 2026
"Perfect is the Enemy of Good": The CISO's Role in Enterprise Security as a Business Enabler
Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are responsible for setting and executing organizations’ information security strategies. This role has only grown in importance as a result of today’s increasingly high-stakes threat landscape. To understand these key decision-makers, we interviewed 16 current and former CISOs to understand how they build a security strategy and the day-to-day obstacles that they face. Throughout, we find that the CISO role is strongly shaped by a business enablement perspective, driven by broad organizational goals beyond solely technical protection. Within that framing, we describe the most salient concerns for CISOs, isolate key decision-making factors they use when prioritizing security investments, and surface practical complexities and pain points that they face in executing their strategy. Our results surface opportunities to help CISOs better navigate the complex task of managing organizational risk, as well as lessons for how security tools can be made more deployable in practice.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2319080
- PAR ID:
- 10656499
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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