effective desicion making process

Week One Lecture

Introduction to Spreadsheet Modeling

Decision making is at the center of all organizations. In fact, decision making is an integral part of a manager’s life (George and Jones, 2005). Managers strive to make solid decisions to assure organizational success. Solid decisions allow the organization to achieve short and long term goals, and at times inadequate managerial decisions lie at the heart of low organizational performance.

Decision making, however does not always follow a predictable pattern; sometimes easy decisions can be quite difficult to make. Internal and external factors to the organization play a vital role in compounding the level of complexity; where organizational behavior is perhaps the most difficult to understand.

Organizational behavior is a major force that influences the decisions in overt and in subtle ways (Schein, 2004). These forces are the result of the organization’s culture. Organizational culture is defined as the system of mechanisms that the organization uses to define itself. These mechanisms can be on the surface or these mechanisms can be hidden and difficult to recognize.

Types of decision managers make

Decision making is typically represented by the process where members of an organization elect specific courses of action to address problems and to respond to opportunities presented to an organization (George and Jones, 2005). There are two basic types of decisions; non-programmed and programmed.

Non-programmed decisions are the decisions the organization experience when members of the company rely on new techniques for addressing opportunities or problems not previously seen in the organization. When faced with a new problem or a new opportunity decision making can be difficult. Under these novel circumstances uncertainty and ambiguity stands in the way of deciphering information and in making a good decision.

On the other hand, company employees also face reoccurring organizational events involving decisions. In these cases, the organization faces programmed decisions. Programmed decisions refer to the standard sequence of behaviors followed when faced with predicted organizational problems or opportunities (George and Jones, 2005). Here policies and procedures help managers make decisions, with great convenience.

Non-programmed decisions appear to be the most challenging decisions managers make in their careers. At the center of this type of decision one confronts the element of ethics. In the following paragraphs, George and Jones offer a simple explanation of the concept of ethical decision making (2005).

In recent years, company leaders have faced tremendous pressures concerning ethical decision making. Ethical decisions promote well-being and do not cause harm to members of an organization or to other people affected by an organization's activities. Although it is easy to describe what an ethical decision is, sometimes it is difficult to determine the boundary between ethical and unethical decisions in an organization. Is it ethical, for example, for a pharmaceutical company to decide to charge a high price for a lifesaving drug, thus making it unaffordable to some people?

While this course does not center in ethics, it is important to recognize that decision making is seldom free of ethical considerations. In this course, the bulk of our interest will gravitate around un-programmed decision making scenarios.

Conclusion:

Successful business leaders are able to analyze data and convert the data into meaningful frames of information that is later used for arriving at a conclusion or decision. However, as the market place increases to expand into the global scene, business conditions become more complex, and even ambiguous. For these conditions, business leaders may also need to make decisions with limited data and scarce information.

References

Jones, J., and Gareth, J. (2005). Understanding and managing organizational behavior.

4th Ed. Prentice Hall, N.J.: Prentice Hall Publishers.

Kros, J.F. Spreadsheet modeling for business decisions. New York, N.Y.: McGraw Hill

Publishers.