Strategic Decision-Making

Andrews, K., 2010. The Concept of Corporate Strategy, 3rd Edition. Financial Times Prentice Hall. [Accessed 13 April 2014]

Rational decision is a state of being agreeable to reasons. The correct decision is not just reasoned but it is also optimal for solving a problem. Mr Weekes, the operation manager, employed series of analytical steps to review possible outcomes for problems by discussing it with managers to come up withdevise particular courses of action.

A number of approaches are offered for organizational science to solve the problem regarding organizational gap between theory and practice. The rational model can be considered as a dominant model on organizational science among the others with the purpose of defining organization as instruments for attaining goals instead of dealing with problems .Furthermore, objectives are defined in favour of organization progress regardless of employees’ ideas in such a model. It is mainly assumed that involved individuals in the organisation’s activities agree reasonably with its major purposes. The main task of managers are

Essentially, managers try to gauge whether they feel “comfortable” with proposed resolutions to specific problems, a task that always involves an assessment of others’ organisational morality and a reckoning of the practical organisational and market exigencies at hand. The notion of comfort has many

Chandler (1977) believes strategy is about using the necessary recourses so the organizations are able to carry out their long-term goals and aims. Which relates to Johnson (1987, pp. 4-5) who states, “Strategic decisions occur at many levels of managerial activity and will be concerned with the long-term direction”.

In the next section the book presents two types of theories: game theory and behavioral theory. Game theory was created over 2,500 years ago by the Chinese military (Ho & Weigelt, 1997). It has only entered the business environment recently but still uses the same concepts and is a tool for doing strategic analysis. Game theory is essentially a way to make decisions. How will it affect your company? How will it affect your competitor? It takes into account cause and effect, considering all possibilities and what resources will be needed. The second theory offered is behavioral theory. This theory investigates why it is that managers often make irrational decisions that may negatively affect the future of the organization. Often, managers make decisions based on their own biases and not necessarily rational like the game theory.

The rational decision-making model describes a series of steps that decision makers should consider if their goal is to maximize the quality of their outcome. In other words, if you want to make sure that you make the best choice, going through the formal steps of the rational decision-making model may make sense. The following are the steps taken to come to a rational decision: 1. Identify the problem, 2. Establish decision criteria, 3. Weigh decision criteria, 4. Generate alternatives, 5. Evaluate the alternative, 6. Choose the best alternative, 7. Implement the decision, 8. Evaluate the decision.

The concept of ‘rationality’ has been talked through the centuries. According to Grey (2013), rationality is a big question because of this proposition which has the meaning and difficulties seem to be defining of a whole set of issues which have resonated through both organisation theory and practice ever since. And rationality is the basis of a decision, rational decision makers are objective and logical, they reach the goal that maximises the value. Not only rationality is important to organisations, and also it can be identified in various kinds of management theories. This essay will introduce the different aspects of the concept of ‘rationality’ and make explanations that how these are recognised in different management theories.

Owing to limited rationality of man, Herbert Simon contends that most decisions are based on limited rationality, that is, the organization is working like a brain. It would be impossible for organizations to attain perfection since their members have limited information-processing abilities (Morgan, G, 1997)

The difficulties that were accompanied with this approach led to deviation from the rational model. Complexity of modern organizations and the limited cognitive ability of decision makers were most influencing factors in the deviation . The decision makers were unable to operate under perfect rationality conditions. The information about a decision was mostly unavailable or unclear, and open to different interpretations. Also, the criteria of evaluating alternative solutions were not agreed upon. It also required very long time and a lot of energy of the decision makers to pursue a maximizing outcome. These constrains led to a conclusion that the absolute rational model is unreachable.

A study published in the winter 1997 volume of Business Strategy Review suggests the major factor in a decisions success is the decision process itself. The study, by Paul Nutt, suggests that poor decision making

Parker’s budgeting decision is a good example of an individual acting with bounded rationality. This term was introduced by Simon in 1957 (as cited in Tolbert & Hall, 2008) to argue that normative models of decision making, which assume fully rational and objective judgement (Teale, Dispenza, Flynn & Currie, 2003), are unrealistic because human rationality is limited. Parker’s judgement may have seemed rational to him, but it was not rational for the organisation, a subtle distinction about rationality made by Storing (as cited in Tolbert & Hall, 2008). Parker’s judgement was also not rational in that he did not have all available knowledge and awareness of risk, which are the conditions of normative models (Teale et al, 2003) and the “official theory” of management (Anthony, as cited in Teale et al, 2003, p. 14). For example, Parker did not know about the variations in the terrain when he made his decision, and he also assumed that the assistant workers could work at the same physical rate that he could. Both of these limitations were factors resulting in a risk to on-time task completion.

‘Strategic Management’ is a very complex term as many eminent researchers and scholars have had different views and conclusions on strategy. According to White (2004), “Strategic Management involves both systematically developing an idea together with its implications and testing the empirical validity & usefulness of that idea against the real world.” Thus strategy is not only about planning for future but also about confirming the validity of the hypothesis considered and implementing it successfully. Strategy formation may take various forms such as implicit, explicit or emergent. Implicit strategy is a strategy formed by intuitions of an individual. As per implicit strategists, strategic management is about reading the environment

This report will discuss about the approach to rational decision making process. It discusses how an everyday problem faced by management can be tackled by using

A strategy, according to Robbins and Barnwell (2002, p. 139) is “the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary to achieve the organisation’s goals”.