Exam 7: Decision Making and Creativity

Employees are more committed to implementing a solution when they are involved in making the decision.

Selene and Rita Selene and Rita are both engineers at a highly innovative technology company.They are both very creative people.Selene has 15 years of engineering background, a high need for achievement and strong task motivation, whereas Rita prides herself on her high openness to experience, strong self-direction and her ability to evaluate the potential usefulness of ideas.According to the characteristics of creative people, which areas are Rita's strongest?

Describe the four stages of the creative process.

Task significance and autonomy are important conditions for creativity in organizations.

The representativeness heuristic is a natural tendency to assign higher probabilities to objects or events that are easier to recall from memory.

As director of new projects, you have just learned that cash flow problems have forced your organization to cut back product development activities.This means that two of the eight projects currently being developed must be terminated along with the employees working on those projects (about 25 per cent of employees in your unit).You have a good knowledge of these projects as well as the performance and seniority of employees who work in your unit.While some projects clearly have a high chance of success, the long-term potential of a couple of them is unknown.Identify the best level of employee involvement in this situation and describe three factors (contingencies) that support this level of involvement.

Subjective expected utility refers to how much the selected alternative benefits or satisfies the decision maker.

InnoBLAST, Inc.George is a manager for InnoBLAST Inc., a web-based applications company.In an attempt to promote new ideas, George decides to allow his engineering team to devote 15% of their work time to whatever projects they would like to work on and reduces their assigned workload.He then institutes a 30 minute period each morning where the team members are asked to look over their current project list for the day and develop more knowledge about a task before they move on to work on their assigned tasks.The time period set aside each morning should help promote which stage of the creative process?

Creative people need have practical intelligence but not cognitive intelligence.

The rational choice paradigm has dominated decision making philosophy in Western societies for most of written history.

Incubation and verification are the:

Perceptual defense causes us to:

The ideas that appear during the illumination stage of creativity are quickly forgotten unless documented.

Employees should NOT make the decision alone (without the manager's involvement) when:

According to bounded rationality theory, people make the best decisions when their perceptions are "bounded" or framed by past experience.

Creativity is defined as reframing a problem in a unique way and generating different approaches to the issue.

WesTech Components wants to hire several people for jobs requiring a high degree of creativity.Identify three individual characteristics that WesTech should consider when selecting job applicants who have a high potential for creativity.

The incubation stage of creativity is more effective when the decision maker sets aside all other activities and focuses attention on the issue or problem.

Creative ideas can emerge when asking people unfamiliar with the problem to explore the problem with you.

Creative people are more embarrassed when they make mistakes.