Planning & Decision Making

In decision making, managers (decision makers) will put a weight to the decision criteria. If the relevant criteria aren’t equally important, the decision makers must weight the items in order to give them the correct priority in the decision. You will know what weight to give to a given criteria based on the importance you give to it. Weights reveal your personal values because only you know what weight to give to the criteria. In organizations, a strong culture is likely to influence managerial decision making by shaping the criteria chosen and the weight assigned.
For example, if the organization’s culture is to cut the cost, then the manager’s priority is likely to make a decision that are involving lower costs. If they make any decision without following the culture, he’s likely to have a short career in this organization.

In organizational decision making, politics play a major role especially the major ones. Politics is how to influence (use power to influence) people to agree with your decision. This is happened because there are different individuals or groups in the organization with different values, goals and interests. The differences will create conflict over limited resources such as departmental budget, space allocation, project responsibilities and salary adjustment. The most important factor leading to politics within organizations is the realization that most of the “facts” that are used to allocate the limited resources are open to interpretation. Sometimes when you make a decision, some of your colleagues are not agreed because they think you do it to further your interests. People in the organization will use their influence to taint the facts to support their goals and interests.

There are times when you already made decision and when you want to implement it, you found out that it didn’t solved the problem. This not means that you make a bad decision. All you can do is reassessing the problem and do the decisions process again.

When the decision maker fined a choice that is good enough to solve the problem, they will quit looking at other choices because he’s satisfied with the choice. Others will think that the manager is settling for the second best. Satisfying choice means satisfactory and sufficient. There is nothing wrong with it. Either you are making decision for your life or for the organization; it won’t required the making of optimizing choices. Satisfying model result shows that no significant loss in organizational performance, the manager accept the decisions that are good enough to solve the problem.

Using intuition to make a decision, can improve the decision making. But, by rely on the intuition only will not helping you making a good decision. You need to combine it with your experience. As you increase your experience, your gut-feelings will gain increasing validity. If you want to make a quality decision making, you need to add rational analysis in your decision making process. There is time when you cannot use your intuition, which is when you don’t have the experience or your experience irrelevant to a specific decision.

Decisions made by the manager are guided by the policies. Policy is a guideline for making decision. Its create parameter that limit the managers but don’t make a choices for them. For example, the company policy is to pay competitive wages. If the data shows that the pay range for certain job in your community is $9.50 to $12.00 an hour, offering a new hire $8.00 or $13.00 would be inconsistent with the pay policy. But within the pay range, you have discretion.

In decision making, experience and creativity will interact. Experience is valuable in decision making because it allows you to draw on previous decisions so you can make effective choices quickly. Experience tends to be more helpful for handling routine decisions on structured problems. Meanwhile, creativity is valuable because it helps you to see problem others don’t see and develop new and unique alternatives. You can use creativity when handling non-routine decision on unstructured problems.

But there’s an irony here. Sometimes the senior executive have more experience but making the non-routine decision. Conversely, the lower-level manager tends to have less experience but they are more likely a creative person. Yet the types of problems they most often face are of the structured variety.

When organization wants to hire a manager, during the selection process the organization tend to select a person that fit with the organization’s culture. Decision style is relatively fixed. But if the manager can adjust his/her decision style to fit the organization’s culture, there isn’t likely to be a problem. But if there is a mismatch, don’t expect the person to change.

Last but not least, in decision making there is no “best” decision style. Any style can be effective under certain circumstances.