Interests behind managers' decisions: why and when do managers decide for managerial or alternative concepts?

Managers' decisions and decision‐making still represent some fundamental puzzles. Often, managers decide for the same prevailing 'managerial' concepts ‐ but sometimes they decide for fundamentally different, 'non‐managerial' ones. The question is why and when exactly managers choose one or the other. The paper identifies and analyses some key explanatory variables behind managers' decision‐making. It is assumed that, amongst other things, managers' interests play a crucial role. In order to interrogate this in more detail, a model of interest‐based decision‐making has been developed and used to identify key factors at the macro level (organisational environment), meso level (intra‐organisational context), micro level (groups of managers), and individual level (individual managers). The analysis leads to the creation of a C‐shaped model that states when managers opt for managerial or non‐managerial concepts.