The impact of the stressor time pressure and the personality trait neuroticism on the quality of decisions in crisis situations an experimental approach

This diploma thesis scrutinizes the impact of the stressor time pressure and the personality trait, neuroticism, on the quality of decisions in crisis situations. Especially during political crises, decision makers seem to be vulnerable to stress. I assess one environmental factor time pressure and one personality factor neuroticism. Three out of four hypotheses focus on one variable each. According to hypothesis 1 time pressure decreases the solution quality of analytical decision tasks. Hypotheses 2a and 2b deal with the moderator and the direct effect of neuroticism. People who score high on neuroticism are assumed to make inferior decisions in general and under stress. Hypothesis 3 draws on both time pressure and neuroticism as explanatory variables for the quality of analytical decisions.I chose an experimental research design to test the hypotheses. Experiments are rarely conducted in political science and international relations although they offer many advantages like the opportunity to draw causal inferences. Forty students took part in the main experiment. Control and experimental group disposed of different amounts of time to solve a so called in-tray exercise which I developed. The in-tray exercise is usually used in Assessment Centres to test the analytical, organizational and decisional capabilities of applicants. All participants filled out a neuroticism personality test.The OLS-regressions did not confirm any of the four hypothesis. Neither the stressor time pressure nor the personality trait neuroticism had an impact on the attained in-tray scores. The boxplot comparison between the in-tray scores in experimental and control group indicate a slight decrease of performance under time pressure. Compensatory and adaptive strategies obviously enable the maintenance of individual performance. In-tray scores in the experimental group showed more variance which points to the importance of individual differences. Whether neuroticism and other personality traits contribute to the quality of decisions under stress needs to be examined more closely in future studies