Organizational Decision Making

Decision making is a big part of the organizational process. Slack describes two different types of decision making, programmed and nonprogrammed. Programmed decision making is the everyday decision making that a company makes based and policies and regulations of the company itself. The book says that problems solved by programmed decision making are well structured, and present enough information to clearly solve the problem. Nonprogrammed decision making is when a new problem arrives that the company has never had to face before. There are two different approaches to decision making each having their own several models to follow. The first is the individual decision making having a rational model and an administrative model to follow. The rational model is more a process of how to make the decision with eight steps to follow. The administrative model is a decision making process that is guided by emotions, time constraints, and imperfect information, which is why it is also known as the bounded rationality model. They describe it as this because the rational model is a good model, however most managers do not follow the process thoroughly. In the second approach, organizational decision making, there are five different approaches in it. The first approach being management science where uses mathematics and statistics to make a solution. Next is the Carnegie model where decisions are made by all subunits and managers in an organization. The Carnegie model describes decision making as a political process. The third process is the garbage can model where decisions are rarely systematic and logical. There are many things changing in an organization and many problems, participants, solutions, and choices are placed within the organization. Fourth is a process known as the structuring of unstructured processes which is pretty self explanatory.  Last is the process of the Bradford studies. Bradford studies focus on the actual process rather than the outcome and the implementation. It has five dimensions, surrounding twelve variables. The decision making process of an organization is very important to the effectiveness of the organization because it determines how things are run in the company. The decision making process is also tied in with the power of the company whether the power to make the decision is high up, or spread throughout the company. Organizations may have many problems and face those problems in different ways, they need to implement the right process for the company to become and stay effective.