Decision-Making Styles in Medical Students and Healthcare Professionals: The Roles of Personality Traits and Socio-Emotional Intelligence Factors

Abstract

Intuitive and deliberative styles can be considered the best-known decision-making styles, which are thought to be linked to actual workplace performance. However, there is a limited research on individual differences in these styles among individuals who provide healthcare. Therefore, adopting the self-report approach, this study examines the roles of the Big Five personality traits and socio-emotional intelligence factors in intuitive and deliberative decision-making styles among medical students and healthcare professionals. The research sample consists of 203 participants (50 medical students, 153 healthcare professionals) who completed the Big Five Inventory, the Trait Meta-Mood Scale, the Tromsø Social Intelligence Scale, and the Preference for Intuition and Deliberation Scale. The regression analyses revealed that attention to one’s emotions and social information processing were positively related to intuitive decision-making style, while the clarity of one’s emotions and social awareness were negatively related to intuitive decision-making style. It was further shown that conscientiousness, neuroticism, repair of one’s emotions, and social information processing were positively related to deliberative decision-making style. The findings highlight the importance of personality and socio-emotional intelligence in understanding decision-making. Specifically, they point out that Big Five personality traits better explain deliberative style, while socio-emotional intelligence factors better explain intuitive style.

Keywords:

• Big Five
• emotional intelligence
• social intelligence
• decision-making styles
• healthcare

Author Contributions

Martin Sedlár: conceptualization, formal analysis, methodology, investigation, resources, and writing – original draft. Jitka Gurňáková: methodology, investigation, resources, and writing – review and editing.

Ethical Approval and Patient Consent

The study was carried out in accordance with the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct introduced by the American Psychological Association and The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. All participants gave informed consent to participate in the research.

Disclosure Statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

ORCID ID

Martin Sedlár https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1512-2740

Jitka Gurňáková https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0651-5542

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Notes

1 The Rallye Rejvíz is a simulation-based international professional exercise and competition for emergency medical services crews, which takes place annually in Czechia. Although healthcare professionals working in emergency medical services are of course the largest group of participants in this competition, other healthcare professionals and medical students interested in emergency medical services are also welcome. There are several categories of the competition, including the student category (student teams), the national category (Slovak and Czech professional teams), and the international category (professional teams from the rest of the world). Within the categories, the teams compete against each other in carefully prepared tasks of varying difficulty, representing pre-hospital situations that emergency medical services teams may face in the real world. Each team’s performance in each task is rated by expert judges (experienced and trained in rating clinical performance in the field) based on predetermined criteria. For more information on this competition, please visit https://rallye-rejviz.cz/en/.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic and Slovak Academy of Sciences (Grant No. VEGA 2/0083/22: strategies, resources, and consequences of emotion regulation in the provision of health care).

Notes on contributors

Martin Sedlár

Martin Sedlár is an experienced researcher interested in issues of personality and cognition in the context of social, occupational, and health psychology. Some of his publications deal with healthcare professionals working in emergency medical services. He has been a co-investigator of several research grants.

Jitka Gurňáková

Jitka Gurňáková is an experienced researcher who has dedicated most of her academic career to the study of decision-making and non-technical skills of healthcare professionals working in emergency medical services. She has led several research grants on this topic and is the pioneer of naturalistic decision-making research in Slovakia.