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Management
, Ninth Edition
Robert Kreitner, Arizona State University
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| | Chapter Summaries
Chapter 8:
Decision Making and Creative Problem Solving
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Decision making is a fundamental part of
management because it requires choosing among alternative courses of action. In
addition to having to cope with an era of accelerating change, todays
decision makers face the challenges of dealing with complexity, uncertainty,
the need for flexible thinking, and decision traps. Seven factors contributing
to decision complexity are multiple criteria, intangibles, risk and
uncertainty, long-term implications, interdisciplinary input, pooled decision
making, and value judgments.
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Managers must learn to assess the degree
of certainty in a situationwhether conditions are certain, risky, or
uncertain. Confidence in ones decisions decreases as uncertainty
increases. Managers can respond to a condition of riskincomplete but reliable
factual informationby calculating objective or subjective probabilities.
Todays managers need to tap the creative potential of intuitive
employees and the implementation skills of those who process information as
thinkers.
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Researchers have identified three perceptual and behavioral decision
traps that can hamper the quality of decisions. Framing error occurs when
people let labels and frames of reference sway their interpretations. People
are victimized by escalation of commitment when they get locked into losing
propositions for fear of quitting and looking bad. Oddly, researchers find
overconfidence tends to grow with the difficulty of the task.
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Decisions,
generally, are either programmed or nonprogrammed. Because programmed decisions
are relatively clear-cut and routinely encountered, fixed decision rules can be formulated for them. In contrast, nonprogrammed decisions require creative
problem solving because they are novel and unfamiliar. Decision making can be
improved with a knowledge management (KM) program. KM is a systematic approach
to creating and sharing critical information throughout the organization. Two
types of knowledge are tacit (personal, intuitive, and
undocumented) and explicit (documented and
sharable).
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Managers may choose to bring other people into virtually every
aspect of the decision-making process. However, when a group rather than an
individual is responsible for making the decision, personal accountability is
lost. Dispersed accountability is undesirable in some key decision situations.
Group-aided decision making has both advantages and disadvantages. Because
group performance does not always exceed individual performance, a contingency
approach to group-aided decision making is advisable.
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Creativity requires the
proper combination of knowledge, imagination, and evaluation to reorganize
experience into new configurations. The domains of creativity may be divided
into art, discovery (the most relevant to management), and humor. Contrary to
myth, researchers have found a weak link between creativity and nonconformity.
A fun and energizing workplace climate can tap every
employees creativity. By consciously overcoming ten mental locks, we
can become more creative.
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The creative problem-solving process
consists of four steps: (1) identifying the problem, (2) generating alternative
solutions, (3) selecting a solution, and (4) implementing and evaluating the
solution. Inadequate problem finding is common among busy managers. By seeing
problems as gaps between an actual situation and a desired situation, managers
are in a better position to create more effective and efficient solutions.
Depending on the situation, problems can be resolved, solved, or dissolved. It
is important to remember that todays solutions often become
tomorrows problems.
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