Importance of simulation training needs: illustration with collective decision making

Decision-making (DM) occurs several times daily in high risk industries and an erroneous choice might have undesirable consequences for people and the environment. Most of the time, industrial DM is collective and subjected to acute stress due to different factors depending on the socio-organizational and technical context. The literature reports combinations that impair DM in groups: for example, under acute stress, members of the group may create and increase an internal cohesiveness, the leadership support and the pressure for uniformity leading to a restriction of information search while divergences are overlooked. Time pressure is identified as a crucial stressor (e.g. Bronner, 1982), reducing interactions among the DM units thus making them less coordinated, encouraging decision-makers to adopt lower-risk options, boosting up the DM process or selecting a simple solution if it is not possible (Gok, & Atsan, 2016).