Leadership Grid between Concern for People and Intuition

Abstract

Intuition has been recognized as an established factor in human psychology and thinking. In this paper we present the results of our study of the prevalence and exercise of intuition in a public construction organization. We found that a majority of engineers believe in the use of intuition, trust it, and use it in their practice. We hypothesized that the use of intuition and concern for people might be correlated. However, no such relationship was discovered. Nevertheless, we found that project engineers and senior resident engineers/area engineers had the same general perception of intuition and also used intuition in their decision-making processes. The engineers we surveyed have a high interest in the welfare of colleagues, but work primarily for their own personal gains. They have a high concern for the safety and health of the public and feel affronted by corruption. They also claim a high level of loyalty to their organization. The scores of the engineers we surveyed generally fall into a zone representing practicality and reasonability, and thereby indicate sound psychological health for organizational management. It is recommended that engineering and management organizations place greater emphasis during training on the use of intuition in decision making and organizational design.