Aim 40 - Chapter 7

Front 1

Decision Making

Back 1

The process by which managers respond to opportunities and threats by analyzing options and making determinations about specific organizational goals and courses of action.

Front 2

Programmed Decision Making

Back 2

Routine, virtually automatic decision making that follows established rules or guidelines.

Front 3

Nonprogrammed Decision Making

Back 3

Nonroutine decision making that occurs in response to unusual, unpredictable opportunities and threats.

Front 4

Intuition

Back 4

Feelings, beliefs, and hunches that come readily to mind, require little effort and information gathering, and result in on-the-spot decisions.

Front 5

Reasoned Judgment

Back 5

A decision that takes time and effort to makes and results from careful information gathering, generation of alternatives, and evaluation of alternatives.

Front 6

Classical Decision-Making Model

Back 6

A prescriptive approach to decision making based on the assumption that the decision maker can identify and evaluate all possible alternatives and their consequences and rationally choose the most appropriate course of action.

Front 7

Optimum Decision

Back 7

The most appropriate decision in light of what managers believe to be the most desirable future consequences for the organization.

Front 8

Administrative Model

Back 8

An approach to decision making that explains why decision making is inherently uncertain and risky and why managers usually make satisfactory rather than optimum decisions.

Front 9

Bounded Rationality

Back 9

Cognitive limitations that constrain one's ability to interpret, process, and act on information.

Front 10

Risk

Back 10

The degree of probability that the possible outcomes of a particular course of action will occur.

Front 11

Ambiguous Information

Back 11

Information that can be interpreted in multiple and often conflicting ways.

Front 12

Saticficing

Back 12

Searching for and choosing an acceptable or satisfactory, response to problems and opportunities, rather than trying to make the best decision.

Front 13

6 steps that managers should take to make the best decisions:

Back 13

1) Recognize the need for a decision

2) Generate alternatives

3) Assess alternatives using 4 criteria: legality, ethicalness, economic feasibility, practicality

4) Choose among alternatives

5) Implement chosen alternative

6) Learn from feeback

Front 14

Heuristics

Back 14

Rules of thumb that simplify decision making

Front 15

Systematic Errors

Back 15

Errors that people make over and over and that result in poor decision making.

Front 16

Prior-hypothesis bias

Back 16

A cognitive bias resulting from the tendency to base decisions on strong prior beliefs even if evidence shows that those beliefs are wrong.

Front 17

Representativeness bias

Back 17

A cognitive bias resulting from the tendency to generalize inappropriately from a small sample or from a single vivid event or episode.

Front 18

Illusion of Control

Back 18

A source of cognitive bias resulting from the tendency to overestimate one's own ability to control activities and events.

Front 19

Escalating Commitment

Back 19

A source of cognitive bias resulting from the tendency to commit additional resources to a project even if evidence show that the project is failing.

Front 20

Groupthink

Back 20

A pattern of faulty and biased decision making that occurs in groups whose members strive for agreement among themselves at the expense of accurately assessing information relevant to a decision.

Front 21

Devil's Advocacy

Back 21

Critical analysis of a preferred alternative, made in response to challenges raised by a group member who, playing the role of devil's advocate, defends unpopular alternative for the sake of argument.

Front 22

Dialectical Inquiry

Back 22

Critical analysis of two preferred alternatives in order to find an even better alternative for the organization to adopt.

Front 23

Organizational Learning

Back 23

The process through which managers seek to improve employees' desire and ability to understand and manage the organization and its task environment.

Front 24

Learning Organization

Back 24

An organization in which managers try to maximize the ability of individuals and groups to think and behave creatively and thus maximize the potential for organizational learning to take place.

Front 25

Creativity

Back 25

A decision maker's ability to discover original and novel ideas that lead to feasible alternative courses of action.

Front 26

Production Blocking

Back 26

A loss of productivity in brainstorming sessions due to the unstructured nature of brainstorming.

Front 27

Nominal Group technique

Back 27

A decision-making technique in which group members write down ideas and solutions, read their suggestions to the whole group, and then rank the alternatives.

Front 28

Delphi Technique

Back 28

A decision-making technique in which group members do not meet face-to-face but respond in writing to questions posed by the group leader.

Front 29

Entrepreneur

Back 29

An individual who notices opportunities and decides how to mobilize the resources necessary to produce new and improved goods and services.

Front 30

Social Entrepreneur

Back 30

An individual who pursues initiatives and opportunities and mobilizes resources to address social problems and needs in order to improve society and well-being through creative solutions.

Front 31

Inrapreneur

Back 31

A manager, scientist, or researcher who works inside an organization and notices opportunities to develop new or improved products and better ways to make them.

Front 32

Entrepreneurship

Back 32

The mobilization of resources to take advantage of an opportunity to provide customers with new or improved goods and services.

Front 33

Product Champion

Back 33

A manager who takes 'ownership' of a project and provides the leadership and vision that take a product from the idea stage to the final customer.

Front 34

Skunkworks

Back 34

A group of intrapreneurs who are deliberately separated from the normal operation of an organization to encourage them to devote all their attention to developing new products.