1. Chapter 1
Decision Making
-Dr. Uday

2. Decision Making
Decision Making is at the heart of organizational effectiveness, climate, and health.
Two dominant issues affect how decisions are made in organizations;
Stability (application of existing practices and maintenance of existing performance levels)
Change (environmental demands for quick response and emerging problems that are ambiguous)
Participative decision making structures are required to effectively manage change.

3. Decision Making
Daniel Griffith’s Theory of Leadership is About Decision Making
Administration is a process of directing and controlling life in a social organization.
The specific function of administration is to develop and regulate the decision making process in the most effective manner.

4. Griffith (continued) Griffith proposed that:
An individual's rank equals his or her degree of control of the decision-making process.
Effectiveness of the leader is inversely proportional to the number of decisions made personally.
The major differences between types of organizations are related to differences in the decision-making process.

5. Individual v. Organizational Decision Making
What is meant by the expectation that administrators should be “decisive”?
How is this different from “organizational decisions”?
It is the responsibility of administrators to establish decision-making processes that establish a positive culture.

6. Rationality in Decision Making
Herbert Simon’s three phases of decision making:
Intelligence activity, Design activity, Choice activity
Peter Drucker’s rational steps in decision making:
Define the Problem
Analyze the Problem
Develop Alternative Solutions
Decide on the Best Solution
Convert decisions into Effective Actions

7. Rational Decision-Making Models
Some models add a “feedback loop” to make successively better decisions eventually reaching “optimal” decisions.
We must recognize that we generally make decisions that are called “satisficing”, that is, they are a solution that is satisfactory, but not necessarily the optimal solution. Why?

8. Limits on Rationality in Decision Making
Vroom and Yetton developed a taxonomy of five leadership styles based on decision making processes:
Autocratic Process:
Leaders makes decision with information available.
Leader gets information from followers (may not tell them the problem) and then makes decision.
Consultative Process:
Leader shares problem with individuals, gets suggestions, then makes decision.
Leader shares problem with the group and then makes decision.
Group Process:
Leaders facilitates a group decision based on consensus. The leader avoids giving his/her opinion, but lets the group decide.

9. Vroom and Yetton (continued)
Analysis of the situation depends on answers to 7 questions:
Does the problem possess a quality requirement?
Does the leaders have sufficient information to make a good decision?
Is the problem structured?
Is it necessary for others to accept the decision in order for it to be implemented?’
If the leaders makes the decision alone, how certain is it that others will accept it?
Do others share the organizational goals that will be attained by solving this problem?
Are the preferred solutions to the problem likely to create conflict among others in the group?

10. The Nature of Managerial and Administrative Work
Henry Mintzberg’s five propositions:
Administrators do a great deal of work, and do it at an unrelenting pace.
Administrators devote brief periods to many decisions that tend to be specific, well defined issues.
Administrators prefer to deal with active problems that are well defined and non-routine.
Administrators prefer verbal communications.
Administrators maintain working relationships with three principal groups: superiors, subordinates, and outsiders.

11. Mintzberg (continued)
The work of administrators is taxing. He states: “The quantity of work to be done . . .during the day is substantial and the pace is unrelenting.”
An “unrelenting pace” is not an unvarying pace, but that there is always more work to do, and that administrators seldom stop thinking about their work.
Mintzberg’s work has been confirmed in studies done with school administrators.

12. How Administrators Think
Do administrators apply rational (linear) decision making principles to decision making, and are they reflective about the decisions they make?
Perhaps, but Karl Weick believes that administrators’ thinking is woven into, and simultaneously occurs with, action.
Schön agrees, believing that decision making is an art, or trained intuition. That is, one learns through education and experience to see a complex system and to view a decision holistically.
Probable connection to left brain thinking (rational, logical, analytical) and right brain thinking (intuitive, holistic, nonlogical)

13. Influence of Organizational Culture on Decision Making
The norms, values, traditions, and beliefs of an organization shape decision making.
Weick believes that culture helps participants ascribe credibility to interpretations they make of their experiences.
Therefore, the culture represents significant thinking prior to action and is implicit in the decision making of administrators.

14. Theory of Practice
The overlapping theories of many scholars provide the basis for HRD concepts: motivation, leadership, conflict management, decision making, and change.
Some cultures are more effective in implementing HRD concepts.
Together these HRD concepts constitute a theory of decision making, the centerpiece of which is participative methods or empowerment.

15. Participative Decision Making
Potential benefits:
Make better decisions
Enhance the growth and development of participants
Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s Model provides a range of potential decision making options for a leader and the organization. This ranges from the leader making the decision to a team making the decision within limits defined by organizational constraints.

16. Participative or Democratic
Democratic decision making may involve a vote, with the majority winning.
Participative decision making as presented in the Vroom and Yetton model and the Tannenbaum and Schmidt model provide the leader with a range of options, but leave the control of the decision in the leader’s domain.
As participation in decisions increases, teachers’ power and influence increase and principals’ power and influence decrease.
The leader should work with participants in the organization to establish a process for making decisions.
Participants should evaluate how the process is working and suggest changes for making the process better.

17. Emergent and Discrete Problems
Discrete problems: elements are unambiguous, clear-cut and quantifiable; elements are readily separable; solution requires a logical sequence of acts by one person; and the boundaries of the problem are easily discernable.
Emergent problems: ambiguous, uncertain and not easily quantifiable; elements are intertwined; solution requires coordination and interaction of many; the dimensions of the problem cannot be fully known until the process begins to unfold.
Administrators or experts can make decisions for discrete problems, while emergent problems are best made with open communication among those individuals who have information and who will be involved in implementing the decision.

18. Who Should Participate?
Edwin Bridges suggests we involve others in decisions when two tests are met:
Test of Relevance--when they have an important personal stake in the problem and their interest is high (Chester Barnard’s Zone of Indifference, Zone of Sensitivity, and Zone of Ambivalence).
Test of Expertise–they can contribute competently to the solution.
We add a third test:
Test of Jurisdiction—if a problem is in their jurisdiction or within their work domain allow participation, but if not, don’t allow them to decide as it may lead to frustration.

19. Team Administration Five techniques of team administration:
Discussion
Information seeking
Democratic-centralist
Parliamentarian
Participant-determining
Participation, however, requires a high level of skills, in particular training in the group process.

20. A Paradigm for Decision Making
Using the four typical steps in the rational model of decision making, the administrator can choose to include others in any or all of the steps:
Defining the problem
Identifying possible alternative solutions
Predicting the consequences of each alternative
Choosing the alternative to follow
In other words, the administrator can make the decision alone, use their input to make the decision, or make a group decision.