Direct Effects of Overconfidence, Herding, and Decision Avoidance Biases on Procrastination in Singaporean Workplace Decision-Making

As part of a broader research programme, this paper empirically investigates the direct relationships between three prominent cognitive biases—Overconfidence Bias (OB), Herding Bias (HB), and Decision Avoidance Bias (AB)—and the behavioural outcome of Procrastination (PR) in workplace decision-making. Building upon the theoretical foundation of a preceding study (Ohms, 2025g), and addressing gaps concerning non-investment contexts and the Singaporean workplace identified in a systematic review (Ohms, 2025h), this study employs a mono-quantitative, cross-sectional survey methodology (Ohms, 2025f). Data were collected from 365 Singaporean employees and underwent validation procedures, including outlier detection, normality assessment, and reliability testing (Ohms, 2025a) to ensure a robust basis for analysis. The paired sample t-tests, correlation analysis, and multiple regression results revealed a highly significant, strong positive relationship between AB and PR (r = 0.797, p < 0.001). Conversely, OB exhibits a significant weak negative correlation with PR (r = -0.222, p < 0.001), while HB displayed no significant correlation. Therefore, AB was validated by multiple regression as the only significant predictor of PR in the base model. These findings show that procrastination is directly influenced by cognitive shortcuts, which supports behavioural economics and organisational practice. They also emphasise how crucial it is to address decision avoidance to improve the efficiency of decision-making in Singaporean work settings.