Delegation and Decision Making

The identification of relationships above indicate that some responsibility must be carried out by each individual in the organisation who will receive the reward for its success and pay the penalties for failure. Responsibility without authority is ineffective, unproductive and frustrating. Uncertainty about these will always cause confusion, chaos and trouble. 

Delegation is an important aspect of good organisation. It is the process of assigning work specifically to some person in the organisation with corresponding responsibility and authority. For simple routine task, this is easy, but its complexity increases proportional to curb complexity. It is particularly important at managerial level in big organisations, where there is no way a person or group of persons can keep track of everything happening in the organisation. 

Delegating responsibility is basically delegating the authority of taking decisions. It is primarily this process of decision  taking (please note, it is not the actual decision itself, but the way in which a decision is reached) to solve a problem which is the core of modern management. It is essential that while taking decisions one is able to substitute 

1. investigation and knowledge in place of opinion or judgement, 
2. intelligent and critical use of analytically techniques in place of Bunche or institution, and 
3. fairness and trust (objectivity) instead of bias, suspicion and favoritism (subjectivity). 

One way of categorizing the problems of decision making is by the state of knowledge about the environment. Traditionally, decisions are taken under following three environmental conditions : 

1. under certainty, 
2. under risk, and 
3. under uncertainty.