Chapter 12 Enhancing Decision Making

1)
Many decisions have elements of both types of decisions and are semistructured,
where only part of the problem has a clear-cut answer provided by an accepted
procedure.

2)
Senior executives face many unstructured decision situations, such as establishing
the firm’s five- or ten-year goals or deciding new markets to enter.

3)
Operational management and rank-and-file employees tend to make more structured
decisions.

4)
Design involves identifying and exploring various solutions to the problem.

5)
Choice consists of choosing among solution alternatives.

6)
Implementation involves making the chosen alternative work and continuing to
monitor how well the solution is working.

7)
Classical models of management state that the actual behaviour of managers
appears to be less systematic, more informal, less reflective, more reactive,
and less well organized than the classical model would have us believe.

8)
Behavioural roles are expectations of the activities that managers should
perform in an organization.

9)
Knowledge workers act as figureheads for the organization when they represent
their companies to the outside world and perform symbolic duties, such as
giving out employee awards.

10)
In their interpersonal role, managers act as the nerve centres of their
organizations, receiving the most concrete, up-to-date information and
redistributing it to those who need to be aware of it.

11)
In their informational role, managers act as entrepreneurs by initiating new
kinds of activities; they handle disturbances arising in the organization; they
allocate resources to staff members who need them; and they negotiate conflicts
and mediate between conflicting groups.

12)
High-quality decisions require high-quality information.