Essay: Decision – making process in management
Chihai Marinela (Economics and Finance)
“Management is nothing more
than motivating people.” (Lee Iacocca)
Every day we choose. Whatever type of decision we are faced with, there is a process that
is taken to determine the best possible outcome. In a personal aspect when I have a decision that
need to be made, I tend to weigh all the possible outcomes and determine which one benefits me
the most.
Managers at all levels and in all areas of organizations make decisions. That is, they make
choices. Making decisions isn’t something that just managers do, all organizational members
make decisions that affect their jobs and the organization they work for.
There are many perspectives in the decision-making process. This essay discusses the
following 2 approaches: rational and intuitive.
Some of managers use rational decision making; that is, they’ll make logical and consistent
choices to maximize value. A rational decision maker would be fully objective and logical. The
problem faced would be clear and unambiguous, and the decision maker would have a clear and
specific goal and know all possible alternatives and consequences. Finally, making decisions
rationally would consistently lead to selecting the alternative that maximizes the likelihood of
achieving that goal. These assumptions apply to any decision—personal or managerial.
However, for managerial decision making, we need to add one additional assumption—decisions
are made in the best interests of the organization.
Psychology researchers recognize that people are not always rational actors—that decisions are
sometimes made not on the basis of increasing expected return, but rather on rules of thumb,
biases, and heuristics used (sometimes without being explicit about the basis of the decision). It’s
making decisions taking into account experience, feelings, and accumulated judgment.
Researchers studying managers’ use of intuitive decision making have identified five different
aspects of intuition: experience-based, affect-initiated, cognitive-based, subconscious mental
processing and values or ethics-based decisions.
Intuitive decision making can complement also rational decision making. First of all, a manager
who has had experience with a similar type of problem or situation often can act quickly with
what appears to be limited information because of that past experience. In addition, a recent
study found that individuals who experienced intense feelings and emotions when making
decisions actually achieved higher decision-making performance, especially when they
understood their feelings as they were making decisions. The old belief that managers should
ignore emotions when making decisions may not be the best advice.
In order to be highered by a company, every candidate should pass through an interview.
They can vary, from the free flowing to the formal. STAR approach, for example, is a
competency-based interview.
Let’s build STAR methods story answer:
1) (Situation) “I was initially a software developer, in a team of 6 developing a new finance
module for our core accounting product.”
(Task) “The project was critical as launch dates had been set with a lot of sales and marketing
investment riding on the product being ready. The project was behind schedule, when our team
leader became ill, and had to leave.”
(Action) “I had been sports team captain at school, where I loved the challenge and responsibility
of leadership. So, I volunteered to stand in, and by using my technical analysis skills, spotted a
few small mistakes made in the initial coding, that were causing the sporadic errors, and slowing
us down. Working hard with the team, we corrected the coding and catched up with the critical
project landmarks.”
(Result) “Though this took us 1.5% over budget the software was delivered on time with a better
than target fault tolerance. The project was seen as a great success as the additional project cost
was minimal compared to the costs of delaying the launch, and the negative affect on our product
branding. I have now been officially promoted to team leader as a result.”
2) (Situation) “A customer rang up complaining that they’d waited more than two weeks for
a reply from our sales team regarding a product query.”
(Task) “I need to address the client’s immediate query and find out what went wrong.”
