LEADERSHIP : THEORIES OF DECISION MAKING & ROLE OF SENSE MAKING / SENSE SHARING - Essay Example

This essay examines the ways in which different experiences are consistent with the decision making theories, while also examining a number of experiences where the decision making theories are not consistent with the real life experiences of working in an organization. This essay examines the way decisions are made during working as an internee in a major new organization. 2 Experiences consistent with Decision Making Theories One of the organizational experience with which the author was able to work as a team in group decision of promoting a new product for the market.

The group decision making in this scenario was highly effective, as certain responsibilities were given to all the stakeholders in the decision process, and the acceptance of decisions was a key issue (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2010). The senior management was able to take the whole team forward in a cohesive manner, and any concerns of the staff were communicated at the earliest. Communication is one of the major key in shared decision making, as it enables a participatory approach to ensure that all participants are fully engaged within the decision making procedure (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2010).

Another positive experience of the decision making process in the same organization was decision making climate was the most important key to the decision making process. The organization had to ensure that a number of redundancies would take place in the aftermath of the economic crisis in 2008. In this case, the organization was able inform all the stakeholders in advance about the possibility of redundancy, and a participatory approach was undertaken to ensure that the routine forms of resistance to change can be addressed (Prasad and Prasad, 2000).

This was undertaken in a way that all the employees were given regular bulletins, and a work group was formed which was inclusive in nature and included all the major stakeholders in the organization at all the different levels, which research suggests can be highly effective, especially when there is a competitive climate (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2010). A third example of positive experience with decision making theories was when rational decision making has also worked in a number of instances within the organization.

The organization had incomplete information about the success of it’s online marketing strategy, and the lack of clarity meant that the senior managers were unable to make a clear decision about future investments. In this instance, rational decision making was undertaken which can also be highly effective in organizations (Goll and Rasheed, 2005, Paternoster and Pogarsky, 2009, Reyna and Rivers, 2008). The process of information collection was undertaken, where all possible information was collected by the managers, before a rational choice could be made depending on the amount of information which was available, and this proved to be a good choice in the long run.

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