You will possibly agree that decision making is an integral part of everyday life. Whether you arc at home or in the office or in the playground, you are almost constantly making decisions, sometimes working on several at the same time. These may he major or minor, but some of these might have proved to be effective decisions, viz. appropriate, timely and acceptable. Some of your decisions naught have been wrong, hut you knew that there was something worse than a few wrong decisions and that was indecision !
Making decisions has been identified as one of the primary responsibilities of any manager. Decisions may involve allocating resources, appointing people, investing capital or introducing new products. If resources like men, money, machines, materials, time and space were abundant, clearly any planning would be unnecessary. But, typically, resources are scarce and so there is a need for planning. Decision making is at the core of all planned activities. We can ill afford to waste scarce resources by making too many wrong decisions or by remaining indecisive for too long a time.
In this unit, various techniques involved in decision making. e.g. brainstorming, synthetics, and nominal grouping are described and discussed. Then the Unit describes various methods for identification, selection of various alternatives and implementation of decisions made. Differences and similarities between individual versus group decision making are then explained, including the phenomenon of group think. Various barriers to effective decision making are finally enumerated.
Objectives
After studying this unit, you should be able to
- appreciate the three steps of the process through which you make any decision,
- classify the kinds of decisions you make,
- identify the varying degrees of knowledge under which you make decisions,
- recognize the assumptions of different models which either describe how decisions are made or prescribe how decisions should be made,
- appreciate the necessity of identifying and evaluating a reasonable number of possible alternative actions for accomplishing organisation objectives,
- display familiarity with various means for generating alternative courses of action,
- decide to what extent participation of others is desirable: when and how group decision strategies should be used, and
- diagnose roadblocks to effective decision making and develop some strategical to overcome them.
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