Risk-Taking Behavior and Risk Management Risk Management Article Review

Dominic Cooper (2003) reviews the various factors that influence risk outcomes, with a focus on how personality can have a significant effect on risk-taking behavior. The first half of the article dives into the admittedly murky waters of the associations between personality types, group dynamics, and risk-taking behavior, while the second half discusses risk management and control strategies. Importantly, Cooper states explicitly that individual and group factors are hard to control or change. Despite this attitude, he puts considerable effort into describing the different personality types, their propensity for risk-taking behavior, and the likelihood of harm. In the final analysis, personality, task experience, promise of a reward, and group dynamics seem to have the greatest influence on risk-taking behavior. If the first half of the article were to have a summary, it would be that the sources of risk amenable to controls, people can be controlled...

These include establishing a hierarchy of risk policies, risk identification, risk assessment, risk evaluation, implementing risk controls, and iterative reviews and reevaluations of risk once controls have been implemented. Cooper (2003) also emphasizes the importance of generating a risk management paper trail and scheduled risk reevaluations.
Critique

Unfortunately, Cooper (2003) fails to integrate the first half of the paper with the second half. At the very beginning of the article, Cooper (2003, p. 39) states that the link between personality and risk has not been well studied. Later in the article he states that of all the factors contributing to risk, individual and group factors are the least controllable. In other words, one half of the article is spent describing factors contributing to risk that are least amenable to risk control measures.

Cooper (2003)…