Analyze communication challenges and the decision-making process to provide recommended solutions using professional communications.
Decision making is one of the most important functions that a manager must perform. The other areas that will be covered in this week are group decision making, ethics in business, and environmental scanning. Ethics in business and environmental scanning are both closely related with decision making.
Your Learning Objectives for the Week:
Analyze communication challenges and the decision-making process to provide recommended solutions using professional communications.
Using scholarly literature, apply principles of management to case problems and current events.
Importance of Ethics
Imagine that you’ve worked in an organization for perhaps 30 years. You’ve put in a lot of hard work and saved your money for retirement in the company’s pension fund.
Now you are ready to retire. Just before you do so, your world collapses around you. The news comes out that your company has been engaged in questionable accounting practices, the price of the stock tumbles, and your firm declares bankruptcy. It turns out that your company had invested most of the pension fund in its own stocks. You are left holding worthless stock, and your dreams about retirement have disappeared.
This is not some nightmare plot from a novel, but it actually happened at Enron, and the energy giant declared bankruptcy in 2003 shortly after all this happened. Other such scandals involving highly-respected firms such as Arthur Andersen and WorldCom have made ethics and unethical business practices a topic of media attention.
These, of course, are the more blatant examples of unethical business practices. In everyday business affairs, and even in our daily lives, each one of us is called on every day to make decisions that have to do with ethical dilemmas.
Very simply stated, ethics is about right and wrong and the system of rules and guidelines that we use to tell us right from wrong. Business ethics is the system of rules and guidelines developed by an organization to guide its actions. As the Enron fiasco and other stories suggest:
“Good ethics is just good business, and good business is just good ethics.”
Ethics becomes an important issue when we encounter an ethical dilemma. An ethical dilemma is a decision-making situation where we have several options to choose from, some of which are fuzzy in terms of whether they are right or wrong.
Problem Solving
The usual way of dealing with problems is:
Diagnosing→Action Selection→ Implementation
Diagnosing means making sense of events within a proper context to give them meaning. Action selection means choosing appropriate actions to solve the diagnosed problem. Implementation means putting the plan into action and monitoring progress toward resolving the issue.
The most important step in the process is actually the diagnosis phase. Correctly identifying a problem is a large part of solving it. If we do not correctly diagnose the problem, any interventions likely will be ineffective because the problem will not be addressed. When possible, taking the time to gather accurate data and interpreting that data to detect root causes is one of the most important tools of an effective manager.
Identifying a problem means framing it. The frame of a situation is the decision maker’s cognitive image of the situation. Framing means embedding the observed events in a context that gives them meaning.
Textbook: Daft, R. L. (2021). Management (14th ed.)
This week, we examined a managerial activity that spans all four functional areas: decision making. Our exploration included managerial ethical dilemmas and the specific decisions faced by managers in business today. Address the following:
Select a manager. This can be someone you know or someone you have learned about through the news, reading, etc.
Assess his or her strengths in decision making based on assigned reading concepts/theory. Research can also be supplemented from (but not solely based on) other information from academically credible resources.
Assess that same manager’s decision-making weaknesses using the assigned reading concepts/theory. Research can also be supplemented from (but not solely based on) other information from academically credible resources.
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