Managerial reasoning about aspirations and expectations

Managerial reasoning about performance targets and subsequent actions can be influenced by whether they focus their attention on expectations of future events or internal efforts to meet organizational goals. This study explores how managers think about expectations and aspirations by examining the semantic similarities and differences between these concepts for practicing managers and economists, the results suggesting subtle differences in how economists and managers reason about aspirations and expectations. For economists, the concept of expectations played a major role and influenced their subsequent thinking about goals and actions while managers conceptually separated factors that were controllable and uncontrollable, the concept of expectation not playing the central role for them. Implications for descriptive and prescriptive models of decision-making are discussed.