ABSTRACT
Making decisions is a fundamental part of a manager’s role regardless of their sector.
Their organization’s constitution, rules, hierarchy, etc. will place limits on what they
may make decisions about. Culture in organizations plays a role, too. In that respect
public managers tend to differ from private sector managers. Nutt (2006) studied the
way public and private sector managers made budget decisions and found that the
private sector managers seemed to place too much reliance on analytics and too little
on bargaining. The public sector managers, on the other hand, tended to understand
the limits of analysis but placed too much reliance on bargaining and too little on
networking.
