Exam 7: Decision Making and Creativity

One school of management thought states that organizational decisions and actions are influenced mainly by what attracts management's attention,rather than by the objective reality of the external or internal environment.Which of the following practices is closely associated with this argument?

A consumer products company wants more creativity in its research and development operations.The company has spent large amounts of money on creativity training sessions that have helped somewhat,but the VP of research and development believes that the fundamental conditions must be altered to foster more creativity.Describe three conditions (other than training) that this organization should establish to increase the level of creativity in its research and development operations.Briefly explain how each condition might improve creativity.

The first stage of the creative process is:

Creativity tends to suffer during times of downsizing and corporate restructuring.

Decision making is a nonconscious process of moving toward a desirable state of affairs.

Which of the following is assisted by incubation in the creative process?

The most accurate view of intuition is that it is:

The rational choice paradigm assumes that decision makers have limited information-processing capabilities and engage in a limited search for alternatives.

The emerging emotional view of decision making states that people form preferences toward alternatives as soon as they receive information about those alternatives.

Describe the rational choice paradigm of decision making.

Which of these is also referred to as participative management?

What is intuition? What are its major implications in decision making?

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.

Escalation of commitment occurs when employees increase their support for a decision because most of their colleagues also support that decision.

Availability heuristic refers to the tendency:

A large financial institution is losing market share to savvy upstart companies and it has asked its top marketing executive to identify the main reasons for their sliding performance.Describe three barriers that might cause the marketing executive to poorly identify the problem(s) and include an illustrative example for each barrier.

Employee involvement tends to weaken synergy in the decision-making process.

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

Decision makers have a need to reduce uncertainty,so they tend to engage in solution-focused problem identification.

Nonprogrammed decisions require all steps in the decision model because the problems are new,complex,or ill-defined.