Decision Making

Decision Making

In reality, good management in organization based their perfomance on how good they are in decision making. Regardless of whether the organization is in the form of government insitutions, small enterprise or private company, the truth is we are dealing with satisfying decision not the best one. Nevertheless, there is a set of attributes that the most manager, or leader, can share with their member, or follower, in order to making a good decision. The basic concept of the good decision making consists of process and style.

When leader are faced with making a decision, they should have thought that this action is for the future. Although it is clear that leader could make their decision based on what happened in the past, such as economic condition, sales data or company growth. From the beginning, leader is supposed to distinguish the purpose of their decision. Is it a programmed or non-programmed decision ? For programmed decision, here, decision making is related to systematic procedure which is establish and routine. Mostly, in this kind of decision, leader will go with the lower levels of organization. Next, for non programmed decision, they are relatively unstructured and generally required a creative approach. Hence, there are some consequences after decision is made, i.e it is intended, unintended, or deferred. (Source : Course material : Decision Making, by Bess).

As mentioned above, the best thing that leader can do is making a satisfying decision. In this case, the decision making process is never easy, even more complicated. Leaders urge to plan and think the final decision and its consequences. Some will maximize their intuition, while some will use optimizing approach. Moreover, the process can be more difficult while there is any information bias. What should we do with this bias ? Since, this bias is not a good or bad situation, leader has to separated carefully between fact and adhered factor while gathering information for the purpose of decision making.

The ways that leader make a decision is another thing, they have decision making style. Choosing one appropriate style depend on the situation and the party that involved in decision. The style is derived by balancing tolerance of ambiguity and way of thinking.