Exam 12: Decision Making Processes

Managers block or distort negative information when they are personally responsible for a negative decision and consistency and persistence are valued in contemporary society are the two explanations why managers escalate commitment to a failing decision.

Which type of decision-making would typically be used to the extent possible in an objective process of selection of a new employee?

List and describe the steps of the rational approach to decision making.

A venture team is an alliance among several managers who agree about organizational goals and problem priorities.

The selection phase of the incremental model is very clear that managers must analyze and choose on the basis of objective criteria in order to avoid any future delay that would interrupt implementation.

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

Intuitive decision processes would work best when which of the following factors were dominant:

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

Discuss the four cells of the contingency framework.

The prospect theory suggests that the threat of a loss has a greater impact on a decision than the possibility of an equivalent gain.

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.

According to the contingency framework for decision models, the Carnegie Model for organizational decision making should be used when:

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

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?

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

Based on the fact that the management science approach uses quantitative data, which are not rich, discuss limitations of the approach for organizational decision making.

The rational approach to decision making involves all of the following steps except:

Problem consensus and technical knowledge about the means to solve those problems are two characteristics of organizations that determine the use of decision approaches.

A decision interrupt occurs when an organization must cycle back through a previous decision and try something new.

The important decisions made on the title of the Star Wars movie or purchasing the McDonald name for $2.7 million were examples of: