Exam 12: Decision Making Processes

A small university department was comprised of six male faculty members. During faculty meetings when the department was faced with a difficult decision, a faculty member would suggest they take a break. During the break, four faculty would adjourn to the coffee room and agree on the decision that would be made. This is an example of:

Many nonprogrammed decisions involve strategic planning because uncertainty is great and decisions are complex.

The point of the rational approach is that managers use systematic procedures to arrive at good decisions.

What is a decision interrupt? Give at least two examples from your own experience.

During the "specify decision objectives" step of the rational approach, the manager determines what performance outcomes should be achieved by a decision.

The Carnegie model and the incremental model disagree with each other on how decisions are made--the former claiming that they are made through a political process and the latter claiming that they emerge over time following careful objective analysis.

The garbage can model shows:

____ means organizations accept a satisfactory rather than a maximum level of performance, enabling them to achieve several goals simultaneously.

Only by making mistakes can managers and organizations go through the process of ____ and acquire sufficient experience and knowledge to perform more effectively in the future.

In intuitive decision making, experience and judgment rather than sequential logic or explicit reasoning are used to make decisions.

Management science, although cumbersome, cannot produce failures in decision making.

Management science is an excellent device for organizational decision making when problems are analyzable and when the variables can be identified and measured.

High-velocity environments call for decision makers to depend heavily on one or two savvy, trusted colleagues as counselors, even though everyone is ultimately involved in the decision.

Management knowledge refers to understanding and agreement about how to solve problems and reach organizational goals.

Intuition is arbitrary and irrational.

When eighteenth-century politician and diplomat Benjamin Franklin was faced with a difficult problem, he would divide a sheet of paper into two columns labeled "Pro" and "Con" and write down various reasons for or against a particular decision. Over several days Franklin would narrow down the list based on a system of weighing the value of each pro or con until he reached a determination of the best decision. Franklin's approach can best be described as a _____ approach.

If organized anarchy existed in the decision environment of a company in the high tech industry, would your goal as a decision maker be to remove that organized anarchy, or to work with it? Explain. How could decisions at that company best be analyzed? How would managers go about using the model to improve decision processes?

The first four steps of the rational approach to decision making are specifically designed to help a manager:

_____ refers to the tendency of people in groups to suppress contrary opinions.

Which step in the rational approach immediately follows developing alternative solutions?