Models of decision making Essay

When we speak of demythologised behavior, we should remember that our focus in this discussion is not on making endings, provided rather on how to support the sue of making closes. Managers argon change agents, not full determination view asrs, so the steps before and after a decision be as important as the actual choice of action. propaedeutic steps complicate creating tension for change, understanding the positions of the various constituencies, and developing policy-making support for a chosen action. Steps after the decision include naming the change monitor and identifying the monitoring methods. at that placefore, the mission of considerably instruction system is broader than just collecting data to take a choice. Designers of entropy systems must understand not only how theatre directors think but as well as how the decision process result be implemented in the managers environment. An schooling system that is well design is an information system that is u sed.Thus, an information system, in order to be useful, must be implemented. To understand the death penalty process better, we review three mildews of brass sectional decision making rational, administrative, and semipolitical.The Rational Model. The rational model of decision making was introduced earlier in this chapter. It is based on the logic of optimal choice the choice that would maximize value for the transcription. The manager is live withd to be an objective, totally informed person who would select the more or less efficient alternate(a), maximizing whatever amount and attribute of output s/he values. We can summarize the rational choice process as follows 1. An mortal is confronted with a number of known alternative courses of action. 2. Each alternative bears a set of possible consequences.These consequences are known and are quantifiable. 3. The individual has a system of preferences or utilities that permits him or her to rank the consequences and film an alternative. There is no empirical support for the contention that these three phases are in truth used. In reality, managers seldom apply the time or money to contemplate all alternatives or envision all consequences.If rationality were ever-present among members of an organization, the organization would appear as a coherent and rationalpolicy-making entity that maximizes the accomplishment of a unique set of goals and has no internal conflicts. In another(prenominal) words, a rational decision process implies a rational organization. A rational organization is an organization that has (1) centralized provide, (2) harmony and consistency of goals crosswise boundaries, and (3) members who are objective, fully informed, and inclined to choose alternatives that maximize the common rock-steady of the organization.The rational model represents a sanitized vision of how organizations make decisions. In reality, organizations often seem more like complex groups of coalitions fighti ng for shares of exceptional resources, and using multiple sources of information with varying reliability to achieve a set of fluid goals. Individuals within organizations typically have widely diverging perceptions and goals and act to maximize their own gains, not necessarily those of the organization.Because of this disparity in the midst of the rational model and reality, we prefer to accept the rational model to begin with as a benchmark for comparing the remaining two organization decision-making processes. In chaseing for a more virtual(prenominal) description of how organizations make decisions, we turn to the satisficing, or administrative, model.The Administrative Model. The quest for a more realistic description of organization decision making produced a variation called the administrative model. This model sees decision makers as people with varying degrees of motivation who are besieged by demands but have little time to make decisions and thus seek shortcuts to f ind acceptable solutions. Under the administrative model, a decision maker does not try to optimize but kinda satisfices treats objectives as loose constraints that can tighten if there are many an(prenominal) acceptable alternatives that fulfill those constraints.While optimization would require choosing the alternative with the highest value, satisficing requires finding the first alternative with an acceptable value, that is, an alternative with a value preceding(prenominal) a minimally acceptable level on a given over constraint. Assume you had a car you wanted to sell. If you listed your car for $2,500 and had 10 offers, you could choose with either method. With the rational method, you would determine which offer had the highest value in price of conditions and price. With the satisficing model, you would accept the first offer that met your lowest acceptable price.Satisficing may require to a reduced decision quality, but it saves time and effort. Satisficing is a ene rgetic construct the aspiration levels of the manager and the number of alternatives determine what is a feasible, good enough solution. It has been pointed out that satisficing is an appropriate (i.e., rational) strategy when the cost of delaying a decision or searching for further alternatives is high in relation to the anticipate payoff of the supposedly superior alternative.When you take into consideration the costs link up to extended search, it is questionable whether the optimum act is to search for the optimum value. When a decision has been reached and the solution to the problem implemented and found to be acceptable, wherefore the organization institutionalizes the procedure used to solve the problem into astandard operating procedure (SOP). SOPs are rules, programs, and routines that are invoked by managers to gain time and to forfend the task of solving a problem from scratch each multiplication it appears.Sometimes managers invoke those SOPs when the organization is facing a confusable but not identical problem to the one that the SOP earlier solved. Since SOPs are often processes that worked once but nobody is quite an sure why or whether it was the best way to solve the sea captain problem in the first place. SOPs are not invariably the time-savers they are supposed to be. Once implication of having rationally bounded decision makers in organizations is that organizations cannot be seen as single entities. Rather, problems are broken big bucks and assigned to specialized units within the organization that develop their own priorities and goals.These goals, sometimes termed subgoals, may not agree with the organizations overall goals. This phenomenon has been called local rationality.3 Using the spatial relation, organizations could be viewed as constellations of loosely allied units, each having a set of SOPs and programs to deal with its piece of the problem. As time passes, these units go away more distinct and their subgoals mo re entrenched. These divergences are enhanced by more and more distinct perceptions of priorities, information, and uncertainty they are further reinforced by recruitment, rewards, and tenure.When these tendencies are very strong, the loose alliance of organization units breaks down into organized anarchies. In the extreme case, coalitions are created with conflicting interests. This leads us to the political model of rationality. You should production line that the term political does not imply that this model is only pertinent in the public(government) sector rather the term applies to a type of organization that may exist in any industry or industry sector.The Political Model. In contrast to the rational model, players in the political model (often referred to as incrementalists) do not focus on a single issue but on many intraorganizational problems that reflect their private goals. In contrast to the administrative model, the political model does not assume that decisions result from applying existing standard operating procedures, programs, and routines. Decisions result from bargaining among coalitions. unalike in the previous models, power is decentralized.This concept of decision making as a political process emphasizes the natural multiplicity of goals, values, and interests in a complex environment. The political model views decision making as a process of conflict resolution and consensus building and decisions as products of compromise. The old adage, nick my back and Ill scratch yours, is the dominant decision-making strategy. When a problem requires a change n policy, the political model predicts that a manager will consider a few alternatives, all of them similar to existing policy.This perspective points out that decisions tend to be incremental that managers make small changes in response to immediate pressures instead of working out a percipient set of plans and a comprehensive program. This incrementalist approach can be seen as the simplest or most extreme form of satisficing. The incremental approach of the political model allows managers to reduce the time spent on the information search and problem definition stages.Incremental decision making is geared to court shortcomings in present policy rather than consider a superior, but novel, course of action. In the political model, the stakeholders have different perception, priorities, and solutions. Because stakeholders have the power to veto some proposals, no policy that harms a powerful stakeholder is in all likelihood to triumph even if it is objectively optimal. Our purpose in reviewing these models of organizational decision making is to highlight the realities of decision making that must be accept when developing or acquiring information systems.If the designer of an I/S assumes that the rational model is a valid representation of the way a given organization is being managed when in fact the political model is a more valid description, s/he may ga ther serious implementationproblems. For example, access to information can be very sensitive issue, since in politics, information is power.If managers discover that once a in the buff information system is implemented they will no longer have access to certain data, it is quite possible they will resist the implementation effort. When we consider the issue of organizational decision making, it is important to recognize that the anatomical structure of the organization has a strong influence on how and when information is communicated and who gets winding in what decisions. We now turn our attention to the issue of organizational structure.