Decision-Making in Organizations - Research Paper Example

Decision Making i. Introduction It is literally impossible for any organization to operate in without any form of decision making. Organizations are made up of several departments that have systems making all the operations possible. To get the systems working effectively and efficiently, there must be some kind of decision making that take place. The decision making task is one that every workforce should be capable of making, either as a group, or individually. However, whether it is done individually or as a group, the impact of decision made must affect the performance of the department as a unit, sometimes the impact spreads to the whole organization. Critical decision making on critical issues that affect the performance of the whole organization is normally coordinated and made by the top leadership of the organization. Organizations that make weak or poor decisions show the kind of bad leadership they have. This always reflect negatively on the organization. On the other hand, organizations that make strong or good decisions normally show the competency of their leadership and that impacts positively on the organizational performance. Decision making can follow the bottom-up system. This way, the decision is made by the line management and it is applied to the top management of an organization. Similarly, decision making can come from the top management down the management ladder. There are also situations where decision making is centric as well as when it is horizontal which involves making decision on the same level of management. Organizations need to concentrate on decisions that are in line with its strategic mission and vision statements. Such decisions ones made, should be implemented in order for their effectiveness to be felt in the organization. This paper is therefore aimed at finding out how decision making as an organizational tool works to impact the performance and outcomes of the organization. ii. Searching Indeed, when good decisions are made in an organization, and the decisions are implemented quickly, the performance of an organization will rise to show the increase. When a survey was done on 350 company executives to establish their organizational effectiveness, only 15% of them stated that their organizations help their businesses perform better than their competitors in their respective industries (Paul & Marcia 2006). The article sets it out clearly that what leads to different performance is the quality with which they carry out their services, speed, and how they execute their decision making process. In this case, one would find that those organizations that become most effective are those that score well on their major strategic decisions. Some of the major strategic decisions may include: decisions on which particular markets to enter or exit, the best businesses to sell or buy, and where appropriate they can allocate their talents and capital. However, on the critical operating decisions that require consistency and speed, these organizations do shine (Vroom 2003). Such decisions may include such like; decisions on driving product innovation, how best to position brands, and how best to manage channel partners. Decision making in organizations does not know whether you’re the highly respected company or not. This is because, even these companies with all that respect in their decisiveness can still be faced with ambiguity on who is responsible for which decision. This may lead the entire decision making to hang around only one of the four bottlenecks. These bottlenecks may include: function versus function, local versus global, center versus business unit and outside versus inside partners. iii. Findings After a thorough search over the internet, books and articles, on how decision making in organizations can impact the performance of organizations, I came to know how important it is, the decision making process, for those organizations that have it work for them to outdo their competitors in business (Jocumsen 2004). In order to stay on top of competition, companies need to make good decisions that must also be implemented. One way to ensure that the decision-making bottlenecks are clogged is by having the top management of organizations assign clear roles and responsibilities to junior managers and the same by the junior managers to the line managers. The management, in trying to become good decision makers, must realize which decisions are most important t performance. With that in mind, all the necessary resources and systems can be put in place to necessitate the formulation and implementation of such important decisions (Kotey 2005). For the formulated decisions to take effect in the organizations, the top management are charged with the responsibility of knowing or thinking through who is charged with the responsibility of recommending a particular path, those who need to good a consent, who needs to have an input, those charged with the ultimate responsibility to make the decisions, and who becomes accountable for following up on the progress of the decision made after the implementation (Michailova & Husted 2004). A follow-up becomes very necessary for various reasons. One, it ensures that the decision that was formulated, finally gets implemented throughout the organization so that its impact can take effect. The second reason is that, the follow-up will ensure that closer checks are performed to monitor the progress of the impacts of the decision made, and whether such impacts on the organization are in line with the major strategic objectives and the vision on which the organization is rested. The follow-up process should therefore be made a routine so that no lapses find their way in between. This also leads to better coordination and quicker response times that gives the need for any rectification as soon as it is required. iv. Conclusion I come to realize that, in as much as organizations would want perform well in their business areas and stay on top of their competitive edge, a lot needs to be done in as far as decision making in the organization is concerned. I therefore found out that, only organizations that have their decisions made properly and implemented, reaps the fruits of their efforts. However, an organization can be respected for how they make decisions, but if the decisions are full of ambiguities, they becomes hard to implement so as to see their benefits. Organizations are therefore becoming decision-oriented in the current business environment, more than ever. It is because of the successes that organizations that make good decisions get, that awakens this feeling of having most of the operations of current organizations rely upon decision making. It is also vivid and very important that, the most important step in the decision making line is that of implementation. It is better to implement the decisions to ensure their workability than not to even formulate them at all if they wouldn’t be implemented. References Jocumsen, G. "“How do small business managers make strategic marketing decisions? A model of process,” ." European Journal of Marketing 38.5/6 (2004): 659-674. Kotey, B. "Goals, management practices, and performance of family SMEs." International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research 11.1 (2005): 3-24. Michailova, S. and K. Husted. "Decision making in organisations hostile to knowledge sharing." Journal for East European Management Studies, 9.1 (2004): 7-19. Paul, Rodgers and Blenko Marcia. "Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance." Harvard Business Review (2006): 13-15. Vroom, V.H. "Educating managers for decision making and leadership." Management Decision 41.10 (2003): 968-978. Read More