How much should we divide and rebuild the
indivisible and complex business environment?

Real executives frequently make management decisions within highly complex working environments that may simultaneously affect many functions and disciplines within the organisation. However, management education in universities has frequently involved segregating areas of business in order to concentrate on narrow subject areas for intense analysis. Whilst a valuable and effective means of studying subjects in detail, management education and qualifications that are based upon concentrated attention to single subjects in isolation, deny the true nature of managing real businesses. Also, some managers make good decisions in complex environments, others do not.

One solution is to provide management students with appropriately realistic and complex organisational simulations where they can experiment with alternative decision strategies, reflect upon the outcomes, and learn from the consequences of their decisions. In order to develop simulated organisations for use in management education, this study investigated relationships between managers' individual information processing and their decision-making performance within environments of varying complexity. The research design included examination of these relationships for subject managers, using a series of well-established computerised instruments. The results of this study highlighted a need for simulations to be programmed to accommodate differences in managerial context amongst private, government and NGO sectors. A need for further research was identified to establish performance benchmarks and design parameters to simulate a series of alternative and multiple organisational cultures.