Self-Identity And Decision-Making Process

Session three to six mainly discuss four steps about how people receive information, re-produce and process information and use this information to make decisions. The four steps refer to recognize humanity, self-identity, sense-making and decision-making, arranging from inner to outside, from general to specific. They are running independently, instead, different layers interconnect with each other, they jointly form a successive progress of dealing with information around people. Furthermore, these layers share some similar characteristics such as sociality.
First step: human nature forms the foundation of receiving information.
The first layer is about human nature, which points to the communal characteristics of whole human beings. Nature …show more content…
Self-identity relies largely on social circumstance, it is constructed through interactions between self and others, culture and society, time and space. First of all we should be clarifies the difference between self-identity and human nature. Human nature is enduring and stable compared to self-identity, whereas self-identity can be constantly changed according to the social environment. The belief of human nature can affect and change self-identity
“Value” and “personality” are the two critical concepts in self-identity work, especially how people’s self-identities play in organizations. Value, as Cowan said, has three layers: surface value, hidden value and deep value . Deep values contain in biological, psychological and social systems that significantly affect leaders as well as their strategies toward organizations. Personality refers to “the sum total of ways in which an individual reacts to and interacts with others .” Though scholars have developed a large amount of technics to measure personalities, those measurements can only categorize different personalities into some generalize types, they are not be able to tell someone’s personality without taking specific and complex social circumstances into account. Values and personalities influence the whole organizational culture through employees and leaders who construct it. For example, Adler illustrated six cultural dimensions leads …show more content…
As our actions are guided by sense-making, it’s important for us to improve our sense-making abilities. Weisinger provided several methods about increasing it, like monitoring our actions, observing the impact of our actions, recognizing that there are different ways people can respond to our actions. That last one should be paid more attention to, I think it require a sense of empathy, a strategy of changing each other’s positions. Usually, it is easy to think about things from one’s own interest but it is hard to realize other people’s response since any movement is reciprocal in some degree.
Viewing sense-making by separating it into different stages, Weick gave us a valued perspective that there are six stages involved in sense-making process: noticing and bracketing, labeling, retrospectively thinking, presumption, social and systemic consideration, action and communication.
One thing we should be aware of is that sense-making study rests on some contradictions. On one hand, sense-making is about the purist of true story and getting it right On the other hand, people will never get the ultimate truth since a “salutary story” keeps going in accord with social stream.
Forth step: