Busi 240 Quiz review Ch 7,8,15
Chapter 7 - Rational Choice Decision Making
Decision Making - Process of making choices among alternatives w/ the intention
of moving toward some desired state of affairs.
Problem - Is a deviation between the current and the desired situation.
Rational Choice Decision Process
1. Identify the problem or opportunity.
2. Choose the best decision process - to find the solution.
3. Discover or develop possible choices.
4. Select the Choice with the highest value.
5. Implement the selected choice.
6. Evaluate the selected choice.
Solution-Focused Problems
●Ex. “The problem is that we need more control over our suppliers.” This isn’t
a description of the problem it's just rephrased as a possible solution.
●Decision makers fall into this because they have been reinforced by past
successes with that solution.
Stakeholder Framing - Employees point to external factors as the cause of
production delays. Suppliers convince corporate clients that they are at production
systems or raw materials.
Decision Making - The process of making choices among alternatives with the
intention of moving toward a desired state of affairs.
Divine Discontent - The mindset that is characterized by never being satisfied
with current conditions no matter how successful that situation may be.
Bounded Rationality - The idea that, in decision-making, people are limited by
their ability to process information, their cognitive abilities, and the finite amount of
time they have to make decisions.
The implicit favorite - selecting a preferred alternative and then skewing other
alternatives to make the chosen one appear to be “the best”
The rational choice paradigm completely ignores the effect of emotions in human
decision-making.
Intuition - The ability to sense when a problem or opportunity exists and to select
the best course of action without conscious reasoning.
Bounded rationality - the concept that decision-makers process limited and
imperfect information and rarely select the best choice.
Scenario Planning - Systemic thinking about alternative futures and what
organizations should do to anticipate and react to those environments.
Confirmation Bias - When evaluating decisions, people often ignore or downplay
the negative and over-emphasize the positive outcomes of the decision.
Maximizing - According to the rational choice paradigm, people choose the
alternative with the highest payoff or highest subjective expected utility.
Intuition - The ability to know when a problem or opportunity exists and to select
the best course of action without conscious reasoning. The “inner feeling” or “gut
instinct” we have when making a decision. These signals warn of impending danger
or motivate us.
Escalation of Commitment - The tendency to repeat an apparently bad decision
or allocate more resources to a failing course of action.
The lowest level of employee involvement - Asking individual employees for
specific information without describing the problem the information is needed for.
Insight - The stage in the creative process model in which we suddenly become
aware of a unique idea.
The Tangible Rule - Stresses the importance of building low-cost prototypes as a
rich form of communication.
Employee Involvement - The degree to which employees influence how their work
is organized and carried out.
Mental Models - knowledge structures that we develop to describe, explain, and
predict the world around us. Exist as visual or relational images in our minds of the
external world.
Identifying problems and Opportunities More Effectively
1. Increasing awareness of problem identification flaws,
2. leaders require considerable willpower to resist the temptation of looking
decisive when a more thoughtful examination of the situation should occur.
3. Create a norm of “divine discontent” - Never be satisfied.
4. Discussing the situation with colleagues and clients. - Easier to find blind
spots when others are giving info.
Biased Decision Heuristics:
●Anchoring and adjusting heuristic - we are influenced by and initial anchor
point and do not sufficiently move away from that point as new.
●Availability Heuristic - tendency to estimate the probability of something
occurring by how easily we can recall those events.
●Representatives heuristic - We pay more attention to whether something
resembles something else than to more precise statistics about its probability.
Satisficing - They choose the first alternative that exceeds a standard of
acceptance for their needs and preferences. In other words, they choose an
alternative that is “good enough.”
Scenario Planning - A disciplined method for imagining possible futures. Involves
thinking about what would happen if a significant environmental condition changes
and what the organization should do to anticipate and react to such an outcome.
Best for choosing best solutions under possible scenarios.
Escalation of Commitment - The tendency to repeat an apparently bad decision
or allocate more resources to a failing course of action.
4 reasons decision-makers are led into failing projects.
1. Self-justification effect. - People try to convey a positive public image of
themselves.
2. Self-enhancement effect. - People have a natural tendency to feel good about
themselves to feel luckier, more competent, and more successful than
average - regarding things that are important to them.
3. Prospect theory effect. - States that people have an inherent tendency to
experience stronger negative emotions when losing something of value than
positive emotions when gaining something of equal value.
4. Sunk costs effect. - People inherently feel motivated to invest more resources
in projects that have high sunk costs-the value of resources already invested
in the decision.
Creativity - The development of original ideas that make a socially recognized
contribution.
The Creative Process Model:
1. Preparation - Understand the problem or opportunity - Investigate information
that seems relevant to the issue.
2. Incubation - Period of reflective thought
3. Illumination - Sudden awareness of a novel, although vague and incomplete
idea entering one’s consciousness.
4. Verification - Detailed logical and experimental evaluation of the illuminated
idea.
Divergent thinking - reframing the problem in a unique way and generating
different approaches to the issue.
Learning Orientation - A set of beliefs and norms that encourage employees to
question past practices, learn new ideas, experiment putting ideas into practice,
and view mistakes as part of the learning process.
Four Rules of Design Thinking:
1. Human rule - Involve several people so the issue and possible solutions are
viewed from several angles. Include clients and end users to enable an
interactive process of problem identification and solution development.
2. Ambiguity Rule - Preserve ambiguity rather than seek clarity too quickly.
Question and refine the stated problem.
3. Re-Design Rule - Review past solutions to understand how those inventions
tried to satisfy human needs. Using foresight tools to imagine better solutions
for the future.
4. Tangible Rule - Build several low-cost prototypes to test ideas. Don’t analyze
alternatives at a purely conceptual level.
Employee involvement potentially improves decision-making quality and
commitment. Improves the number and quality of solutions generated. Several
people can pool ideas to get better solutions. Under specific conditions, it improves
the evaluation of alternatives.
4 Contingencies for the employee involvement model:
1. Decision structure - The benefits of employee involvement increase with the
novelty and complexity of the problem or opportunity.
2. Source of decision knowledge - Subordinates should be involved in some level
of decision-making when the leader lacks sufficient knowledge and
subordinates have additional info to improve decision quality.
3. Decision Commitment - Participation tends to improve employee commitment
to the decision. Some employees won’t accept the decision unless they’re
involved in the decision process.
4. Risk of conflict in the decision process - two types. 1. Undermining
employees' goals. 2. Degree of involvement depends on whether employees
will agree with one another on the preferred solution.
Chapter 8 - Teams and Informal Groups:
Teams - Groups of two or more people who interact with an influence each other,
are mutually accountable for achieving common goals associated with
organizational objectives and perceive themselves as a social entity within an
organization.
Team Types:
1. Departmental teams - Teams that consist of employees who have similar or
complementary skills and are located in the same unit of a functional
structure.
2. Self-directed teams - Teams whose members are organized around work
processes that complete an entire piece of work requiring several
interdependent tasks and have substantial autonomy over the execution of
those tasks, usually control inputs, flow, and outputs with little to no
supervision.
3. Task force (project) teams - Cross-functional teams whose members are
usually drawn from several disciplines to solve a specific problem.
All teams are groups.
Social Networks - Informal groups are the backbone of social networks.
Teams are potentially more productive because, in many situations their members
are more motivated than when working alone.
3 motivating forces at work:
1. Employees have a drive to bond and are motivated to fulfill the goals of
groups to which they belong.
2. Members have high accountability to fellow team members, who monitor
performance more closely than a traditional supervisor.
3. Each team member creates a moving performance standard for the others.
Process Losses - resources expended on team development and maintenance
rather than on performing the task.
Brook’s Law - Adding more people to a late software project only makes it later.
Social Loafing - The best-known motivational process loss. It occurs when people
exert less effort (and usually preferm at a lower level) in teams than working alone.
Social Loafing is more pervasive under several conditions.
1. It is more likely to occur when individual performance is hidden or difficult to
distinguish from the performance of other team members.
2. Social loafing is more common when the work is boring or the team’s overall
task has a low significance.
3. Individual characteristics explain why some people are more likely to engage
in social loafing. More common in people with low agreeableness personality
traits as well as low collectivist values.
4. Social loafing is usually more prevalent when employees lack the motivation
to help the team achieve its goals.
Ways to minimize Social Loafing:
1. Form smaller teams.
2. Specialize tasks - individual effort is easier to observe when each team
member performs a different task.
3. Measure individual performance.
4. Increase job enrichment - Social loafing is lower when the team’s overall
objective has high task performance.
5. Increase mindfulness of social loafing and team obligations.
6. Select motivated, team-orientated employees.
The organizational and team environment represents all conditions beyond the
team’s boundaries that influence its effectiveness.
Task interdependence - The extent to which team members must share materials,
informations, or expertise to perform their jobs.
Apart from task interdependence, there are three levels of task interdependence:
1. Polled interdependence - The Lowest level of interdependence -
occurs when an employee or work unit shares a common resource,
such as machinery, administrative support, or a budget, with other
employees of work units.
2. Sequential interdependence - Interdependence is higher here - The
output of one person becomes the direct input for another person or
unit. Assembly line, each person's effort is forwarded to the next
person.
3. Reciprocal interdependence - Work output is exchanged back and
forth among individuals, producing the highest degree of
interdependence. People who design service would typically have
reciprocal interdependence because their design decision affects
others involved in the design process.
Team Size: Teams should be large enough to provide the necessary abilities and
viewpoints to perform the work, yet small enough to maintain efficient coordination
and meaningful involvement of each member.
The 5 Cs of effective Team Member Behavior:
1. Cooperating - Effective team members are willing and able to work together
rather than alone. Sharing resources being flexible etc…
2. Coordinating - Effective team members actively manage the team’s work so
that is it performed efficiently and harmoniously.
3. Communicating - Effective team members transmit information freely,
efficiently and respectfully.
4. Comforting - Effective team members help coworkers maintain a positive and
healthy psychological state. They show empathy, provide emotional comfort,
and build coworker feelings of confidence and self-worth.
5. Conflict handling - effective team members have the skills and motivation to
resolve disagreements among team members.
Stages of Team Development:
1. Forming - A period of testing and orientation in which members learn about
one another and evaluate the benefits and costs continues membership.
2. Storming - Marked by interpersonal conflict as members become more
proactive and compete for various team roles.
3. Norming - The team develops its first real sense of common or
complementary team-based mental models.
4. Performing - Team members are highly cooperative, have a high level of trust
in one another, are committed to group objectives, and identify with the
team.
5. Adjourning - The team is about to disband. Team members shift their
attention away from task orientation to relationship focus.
Role - A set of behaviors that people are expected to repeatedly perform because
they hold formal or informal positions in a team and organization.
Team Building - Consists of formal activites to improve the development and
functioning of a work team.
Team Norms - Are the informal rules and shared expectations that groups
establish to regulate the behavior of their members. They apply only to behavior,
not to private thoughts or feelings. Norms exist only for behaviors that are
important to the team.
Team Cohesion - Refers to the degree of attraction people feel toward the team
and their motivation to remain members.
Six of the most important influences on team cohesion:
1. Member similarity
2. Team size
3. Member interaction
4. Somewhat difficult entry
5. Tean success
6. External competition and challenges
Team Trust:
1. Calculus-based trust
2. Knowledge-based trust
3. Identification-based trust
Self-directed teams (SDTs) - Cross functional groups organized around work
processes that complete an entire piece of work requiring several unterdependent
tasks and have substantial autonomy over the execution of those tasks.
Remote Teams (Also known as virtual or distributed teams) - are teams whose
members operate across space, time, and organizational tasks. Remote teams
operate different than in-person teams.
Production blocking - time-related constraint in most team structures is that only
one person can speak at a time.
Brainstorming - is a team event in which participants try to think up as manty
ideas as possible.
Four simple rules: These encourage divergent thinking while minimiing evaluation
apprehension and other team dynamics problems.
1. Speak freely - describe even the craziest ideas.
2. Don’t criticize others or their ideas.
3. Provide as many ideas as possible the quality of ideas increases with the
number of ideas.
4. Build on the ideas that others have presented.
Brainwriting - is a variation of brainstorming that minimizes the problem of
production blocking by removing conversation during idea generation.
Electronic brainstorming - Same as brainwriting but uses digital networks rather
than handwritten cards to document and share ideas.
Nominal group technique - adds a verbal element to the process.
Ch - 15 - Lewin’s Force Field Analysis Model
Has two sides:
1. Driving forces - push organizations toward a new state of affairs.
2. Restraining Forces - maintain the status quo.
Lewin’s model emphasizes that effective change occurs by unfreezing the
current situation, moving to the desired condition, and then refreezing the system
so it remains in the desired state.
Resistance to change - Takes many forms, ranging from overt work stoppages to
subtle attempts to continue the old ways.
6 Common reasons people resist change:
1. Negative valance of change - Believe the new situation will have more
negative than positive outcomes.
2. Fear of the unknown - A degree of uncertainty and employees tend to assume
the worst when they are unsure whether the change will have good or bad
outcomes.
3. Not-invented-here syndrome - Employees oppose or undermine
organizational change initiatives that originate elsewhere.
4. Breaking routines - People are creatures of habit. And typically resist
initiatives that require them to break those automated routines and to learn
new role patterns.
5. Incongruent team dynamics - Teams develop and enforce conformity to a set
of norms that guide behavior.
6. Incongruent organizational systems and structures - Rewards, information
systems, patterns of authority, career paths, selection criteria, and other
systems structures are both friends and foes of organizational change.
Lewin’s model, main driving forces are:
Developing an urgency for change typically occurs by informing or reminding
employees about competitors and changing consumer trends, impending
government regulations and other forms of turbulence in the external enviornment.
Soruces of resistence. Six main strategies:
1. Communication - top strategy for engaging employees in the change process.
2. Learning - employees need new knowledge and skills to fit the organization’s
evolving requirements.
3. Employee involvement - may be necessary when the change must occur
quickly or employee interests are highly incompatible with the organizations
needs.
4. Stress management
5. Negotiation
6. Coercion
Guiding Coalition - may be the most important factor in the success of public
sector organizational change programs.
Pilot Project - Involves applying change to one work unit or section of the
organization. This tests the effectiveness of the change as well as the strategies to
gain employee support for the change, yet is more flexible and less risky than
companywide initiavtivces.
Action Research - Philosophy is that meaningful change is a combination of action
orientation (because it’s ultimate goal is to change the workplace) and research
orientation (Because change agents apply conceptual frankework to a real
situation).
The Action Research Process:
1. Form client - consultant relationship - you have to determine the clients
readiness for change.
2. Diagnose the need for change - Involves gathering and analyzing data about
an ongoing system, including interviews and surveys of employees and other
stakeholders.
3. Introduce intervention - May include building more effective teams, managing
conflict, building a better organizational structure, or changing the corporate
culture.
4. Evaluate and stabalize change - Evaluating the effectiveness of the
interaction against the standards established in the diagnostic stage.
Appreciative Inquiry - breaks away from the problem-solving and reframes
relationships around the positive and the possible. Searches for organizational
strengths and capabilities and then applies that knowledge for further success and
well-being.
Four D Process of Appreciative Inquiry
1. Discovery - Identify the best of “what is”
2. Dreaming - Envisioning “what might be”
3. Designing - Engaging in dialogue about “what should be”
4. Delivering - Developing objectives about “what will be”
Positive Organizational Behavior - suggests that focusing on an individual’s
positive qualities rather than on what is wrong with the person will improve
organizational success and person well-being.
Parallel Learning Structures - highly participative arrangements composed of
people across organizational levels who apply the action research model to produce
meaningful organizational change.
Review Questions:
The model of organizational change that helps change agents diagnose the
forces that drive and restrain proposed change is: Lewin's force field
analysis model
A primary barrier to productivity in many cultures surveyed is: Resistance
to change
The problem with weakening or removing the forces restraining change is it:
provides no motivation to adopt the change.
According to Lewin, informing employees about innovation by competitors,
changing consumer trends, and new regulations are all factors of the
external environment that: create an urgency to change
The greatest priority and primary strategy for any organizational change is
to: communicate the reasons for change
A formal group of several people who are influence leaders with a similar
level of commitment to the change is an example of: a guiding coalition
XTen Enterprises has been holding system-wide group sessions lasting a few
days during which participants identify trends and establish ways to adapt to
those changes. X Ten is using: future search conferences
What is a highly participative arrangement made up of people across all
levels of an organization who apply the action research model to produce
meaningful change? Parallel learning structure
Pilot programs are useful for introducing change because they: test the
effectiveness of the change
