Assignment: Case Analysis: The Decision Making Process Select a case of organiza

Question

Assignment: Case Analysis: The Decision Making Process Select a case of organizational decision making from the list below, OR select a case from your own experience or reading. If you choose to do the latter, you should obtain the instructor's approval. Your case analysis should cover the following: 1. The context of the decision making processes, including for example: the goals, activities, history or culture of the organization; the complexity and special features of the task or problem; the major stakeholders of the decisions. 2. The main phases or activities of the decision making process, including for example: the background leading up to the problem situation; problem recognition; development and evaluation of alternatives; selection of alternative; and outcome of the decision. Where possible, analyze the information seeking and information use behaviors in the decision making process. 3. Analyze your case using one or more of the models introduced this week. You may also introduce other theoretical perspectives/cases to enrich your analysis. Show how these models/perspectives provide insight into your case. 4. Assess the overall quality of the decision making process. Identify its strengths and limitations. Suggest ways of improving the process. Assignment Requirements: Address the questions above in a comprehensive case analysis. Your analysis should contain a clear introduction, body and conclusion. Focus on quality of writing and content. Generally, a strong paper will be a minimum of 2 pages. Use Times New Roman font size 12 and double spacing. Use APA format for title page, references and in-text citations. No abstract required. Cite at least 2 credible outside sources in APA format. Upload your assignment to this link by Sunday at 11:59 pm (EST). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Case Study Sources These are initial suggestions that might help you to identify cases. You would typically need to look for additional material after selecting a case to study. Bazerman, M. H., & Watkins, M. D. 2004. Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming, and How to Prevent Them. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Burns, Christopher. 2008. Deadly Decisions: How false knowledge sank the Titanic, blew up the shuttle and led America into war. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Browne, Mairead. 1993. Organizational Decision Making and Information. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. (Decision making by a council of a higher education institute in Sydney, Australia.) Chiles, James R. 2001. Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology. New York: HarperBusiness. (Air France Concorde, Apollo 13, Hubble Space Telescope, etc) Choo, Chun Wei. 2005. Information Failures and Organizational Disasters. Sloan Management Review 46 (3):8-10. Choo, Chun Wei. 2009. Organizational Disasters: Why They Happen and How They May be Prevented. Management Decision, 46 (1): 32-46 Chua, Alton Y.K., Selcan Kaynak, and Schubert S.B. Foo. 2006. An Analysis Of The Delayed Response To Hurricane Katrina Through The Lens Of Knowledge Management. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (3):391-403. Drummond, Helga. 1997. Escalation in Decision Making: The Tragedy of Taurus. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Ermann, M. David, and Richard J. Lundman, eds. 2001. Corporate and Governmental Deviance: Problems of Organizational Behavior in Contemporary Society. 6th ed. Evan, William M., and Mark Manion. 2002. Minding the Machines: Preventing Technological Disasters. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR. (Bhopal, Chernobyl, Ford-Firestone, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Y2K, and many others.) Fay, S. 1996. The Collapse of Barings: Panic, Ignorance and Greed. London: Arrow Business Books. Finkelstein, S., Whitehead, J., & Campbell, A. 2009. Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Gerstein, M.S., & Ellsberg, M. 2008. Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental. New York: Union Square Press. (Chernobyl, Merck Vioxx, Hurricane Katrina) E. Frank Harrison. 1999. The Managerial Decision-Making Process. 5th Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (Iranian hostage crisis, Philip Morris in 1984, General Motors in 1978) Kovacs, Beatrice. 1990. The Decision-Making Process for Library Collections: Case Studies in Four Types of Libraries. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. (Collection development decision making in public libraries, school libraries, academic libraries, and special libraries.) National Geographic. 2004-2013. Seconds from Disaster. Documentary films that "investigate historically relevant man-made and natural disasters ... by analyzing the causes and circumstances that ultimately affected the disaster." Neck, Chris P., and Gregory Moorhead. 1992. Jury Deliberations in the Trial of US vs. John Delorean: A Case Analysis of Groupthink Avoidance and Enhanced Framework. Human Relations 45 (10):1077-1091. Perrow, Charles. 1999. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident, Bhopal Union Carbide plant, air traffic control.) Shrivastava, Paul. Bhopal: Anatomy of a Crisis. 2nd ed. London: P. Chapman, 1992. The 9/11 Commission. 2004. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. New York: W. W. Norton. The Members of the Committee of the Inquiry. 2000. BSE Inquiry Report, Volume 1: Findings & Conclusions. London, UK: The Stationery Office. Walker, J. S. 2004. Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Explanation / Answer

Decision making in organization refers to the process of making choices from amongst several options. Furthermore decisions are made at all business levels such as from strategic to operational involving either routine or repetitive choice making opinions. Some decisions indeed can be semi structured wherein only part of the problem has a clear-cut answer afforded through accepted procedure.

Decisions making involves selecting the right action from a series of choices which indeed can either be structured wherein decision rules are known or unstructured wherein decision rules are drawn in under highly uncertain or ambiguous situations made at variety of levels within the organization such as operational, tactical or strategic.

In structured decision making the organization may formulate effective business rules facilitating to specify the needed action in a given situation. Furthermore operational decision making process eventually is considered to be structured, frequent with more certainty, often relying on data and information drawn from within the organization.

Strategic decisions are indeed regarded to be unstructured, made less frequently and may use more information received from internal or external sources. Variety of business models and processes indeed have facilitated to effectively suggest ideally how people actually should conduct their decision making process.

Decision makers involving rational decision model adopts value maximizing calculations and pursue alternatives that best facilitate to effectively convene organizational goals. However rational model do encounter number of inherent weaknesses such as it is rarely possible to consider all alternatives due to unpredictable and complex nature of the market.

Descriptive model of decision making process does indeed facilitate to effectively investigate how individuals actually make decisions. Thus each decision made by an individual or group are eventually affected by number of factors such as individual personality and values, group relationships, organizational power and political behavior.

Various research studies indeed have effectively facilitated to suggest that decisions may be subject to bias furthermore with complex business environment there is greater uncertainty and lack of information availability in the decision-making. Thus rational decision-making indeed can be regarded to be much more appropriate in a stable environment whereas intuitive and subjective decision-making process may be dominative in unstable business environments.

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