Group Decision Making: Strengths And Weaknesses, Personality Traits, Managerial Decision Making, And Essay.

Advantages of Group Decision Making

1. Build as essay constrsting the strengths and weeknesses of group decision making illustrating your support of your arguements?

2. In your opinion how do personality traits impact managerial decision making?What role does "value" play in this regard ? illustrate your answer?

Decision making process is one of the most important organizational activities. Generally the managers are responsible for taking decisions for different types of tasks within the business and employee management. At present, most of the business organizations are dealing with diverse work force.  The members off diverse work team can have different point of views and it often leads to conflict during the decision making process (Wei 2011). For this reason group discussion has gained the high level of importance in the organizational decision making process. At the time of decision making, group discussion plays an important role as more innovative ideas can be gathered from the different team members of the organization. At the same time this process takes more time for making the decision which delays a particular activity. The following discussion will help to understand the different types of advantages and disadvantages of the group decision making process (DuBrin 2013).

Synergy and information sharing are the most important advantages – of the group decision making process. Synergy refers to the concept that the sum of the partial information collected from different team members is not enough for analyzing the whole situation. . The group discussion provides the facility of taking decisions collectively. The judgment of a group decision making process can be more acceptable than the judgment of any individual manager of the organization. Questioning the team members and collecting different answers from them provide more complete and robust recommendations for solving a particular problem than the managerial decision making process. Information sharing is another great advantage of the group decision making process (Griffin and Moorhead 2011). The collective ideas are used for identifying the most effective one for the particular situation. Information sharing also increases the ability to understand and clarify the problems for making appropriate decisions. Group decision making process provides more alternatives for solving a particular problem and the organizations - get several options and ideas for resolving a particular issue. The team members have different types of specializations with different types of knowledge base (Langton, Robbins and Judge 2015). Therefore, the group discussion making process is able to provide more comprehensive ideas. The decisions taken in the group discussions are democratic in nature while the managerial decisions are autocratic. Democratic decisions are more acceptable by the people than the autocratic decisions since all the team members take active part in the decision making procedure. Another important advantage of the group decision making process is the employee motivation. The employees feel motivated by taking part in the decision making process and the employability skills also increase through this (Wilson 2013).

Disadvantages of Group Decision Making

Though group decision making process has a lot of advantages some mentionable disadvantages or weaknesses of this process have been identified. The most important weakness of the group decision making is that it can create a diffusion of responsibility. This can be lead to lack of accountability - of the team members and ultimately hinder the achievement of team goal. In case of failure - to achieve desired outcome nobody takes the responsibility of the failure. Everybody blames other team members for the collective decision. Sometimes the group decisions are less efficient than the individual decisions as this takes more time for being selected and then evaluated (McMurray et al. 2012). Team member selection for the group discussions, arranging meetings, discussion and selecting the superior alternative takes are. The meetings for the group discussion should be well planned. Without proper planning and effective participation of the team members, group discussion meetings will not be able to provide proper solutions. Groupthink is another scenario which can reduce the efficiency of the group decision making process. In this scenario, some of the team members hold stereotypes view while judging opposite people in the group. They may call the entire team weak by considering one weak idea given by a team member. This may be the cause of creating a new problem instead of achieving the solution of the previous problem (Tannenbaum, Weschler and Massarik 2013). These members start judging the opposite by the example of one member. Some other employees will apply direct pressure to the members who are raising questions about their ideas. Some people remain silent in the group discussion just because of thinking that the ideas they have are not so effective for this scenario.  Some victims of the groupthink are just trying to protest against the decisions proposed by other but not expressing any new ideas. These people or victims of groupthink are problematic for achieving the effective outcome from the group decision making process. Group polarization is another important weakness of the group decision making process (Gwo-Hshiung 2010). This is the tendency of the group to converge on more extreme solution to a particular problem. Members of the group decision making process are not so responsible than the individual decision makers. There are different types of process of the group decision making process such as brainstorming, teleconferencing, general meetings etc. The management of the organization should choose an effective option for the group meeting for the purpose of decision making. The option should be chosen based on the situation. Improper selection of the strategy for the group discussion may be the cause of getting improper outcome of the decision making process. In case of presence of any dominating senior in the group discussion may block the ideas of other lower level of employees in the decision making process (Miner 2015).

Role of Personality Traits in Managerial Decision Making

It can be concluded that the group decisions making process is effective in the area of the corporate culture of the present world. The business organizations are getting the scope of taking more superior decisions through the group decision making procedure. It is true that the group decision making process is able to produce more effective ideas but it is also true that the process takes a lot of time. In most of the critical situations, the organizations needs to take decision quickly and they do not have enough time for the group decision making. This is a major weakness of using the group decision making process. The organizations should take necessary steps for avoiding the discussed weaknesses of the group decision making process.

Managerial decision making process associated with the personalities of the managers. The personality of the managers shapes the behavior of them. The acceptability rate of the managerial decisions is dependent on the personality of the managers. Earlier research works in the area of the personality have said that the personality refers to the different types of characteristics used for defining an individual’s behavior. The popular characteristics used for defining personality are shy, aggressive, lazy, loyal, timid, submissive etc. When these characteristics exhibited in a large number of situations, then they are termed as personality traits (Yu and Lai 2011).

Personality traits should get high level of priority in the organizational culture as the decision making process of the organizations is highly attached with this. Identifying the personality traits has become very popular while selecting the employees at the time of recruitment and at the time of assigning jobs. The managerial decisions are taken buy the managers and the decisions are dependent on the personality traits of the managers. Different people think from different point of views while developing ideas for solving a particular problem (Mukhopadhyay 2015). The angle of thinking differs over the personality traits of the people. The effectiveness of the managerial decisions is also dependent on the personality traits of the managers. The personality traits of the employees are also very important for the different types of decisions taken by the managers.  Different organizations have different types of job responsibilities in their work places and different types of jobs require different types of personality traits for conducting them efficiently. While taking the decisions about assigning jobs to the employees, the managers consider the personality traits of the employees for assigning the jobs to the right people (Pinder 2014). The outcome of the managerial decisions is dependent on the proper assessment of the personality traits of the employees. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is the most popular way of analyzing the personality traits of the employees. In this method, the expressions of the employees are analyzed from different angles. Feelings and the way of expressing the behavioral outcomes of the managers are the most important personality traits. The MBTI model analyze ‘thinking versus feeling’ and ‘judging versus perceiving’ for analyzing the ability of working and decision making (Zimmerman and Yahya-Zadeh 2011). While taking any decisions for the wrong activities performed by the employees or low performances of the employees, the personality traits of the managers are the most important fact. In case of very strict managers the employees would get proper punishments where in the case of sensitive managers, the employees would get some lower level of penalties. The sensitivity of the managers is also very important while taking decisions in any ethical dilemma (Wu and Pagell 2011).

Importance of Identifying Personality Traits in Organizational Culture

Personality and values are two interrelated words but they are not the same. Values are the specific terms which describe the beliefs of the people rather than the behavioral tendencies of them. Sometimes values are used for describing the personalities of the employees. Values are often connected with the ethical behavior of the employees. The ethical values of the managers are very important for the managerial decision making process (Aharoni, Tihanyi and Connelly 2011). Especially at the time of ethical dilemmas, the managerial decision making process is fully dependent on the ethical values of the managers. In this type of situation, the managers take decisions based on their values or beliefs about the situation. The managers who live in the world of imagination and the high values of independence and freedom would not be able to take proper decisions based on the dominant values of the organization. The managers should have the beliefs about the organization’s core value for taking the most superior decisions at the time of taking decisions for solving the ethical dilemmas or some critical problems in the work places (Griffin and Moorhead 2011).

The managerial decision making process is totally dependent on the personality of the managers. The angle of thinking and the capabilities of sensing a situation are dependent on the personality traits of the managers. In this area, the values of the managers also play a vital role. As discussed in this essay, at the time of solving ethical dilemmas, the values of the mangers plays the most vital role in the decision making process. Both of the personality traits and the values of the managers are responsible for the effectiveness of the managerial decisions.

References

Aharoni, Y., Tihanyi, L. and Connelly, B.L., 2011. Managerial decision-making in international business: A forty-five-year retrospective. Journal of World Business, 46(2), pp.135-142.

DuBrin, A.J., 2013. Fundamentals of organizational behavior: An applied perspective. Elsevier.

Griffin, R. and Moorhead, G., 2011. Organizational behavior. Cengage Learning.

Gwo-Hshiung, T., 2010. Multiple attribute decision making: methods and applications. Multiple Attribute Decision Making: Methods and Applications.

Langton, N., Robbins, S.P. and Judge, T.A., 2015. Organizational Behaviour: Concepts, Controversies, Applications. Pearson Canada.

McMurray, A.J., Islam, M., Sarros, J.C. and Pirola-Merlo, A., 2012. The impact of leadership on workgroup climate and performance in a non-profit organization. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 33(6), pp.522-549.

Miner, J.B., 2015. Organizational behavior 1: Essential theories of motivation and leadership. Routledge.

Mukhopadhyay, D., 2015. Organizational behaviour across cultures.Organizational Behaviour.

Pinder, C.C., 2014. Work motivation in organizational behavior. Psychology Press.

Tannenbaum, R., Weschler, I. and Massarik, F., 2013. Leadership and organization. Routledge.

Wei, G.W., 2011. Some generalized aggregating operators with linguistic information and their application to multiple attribute group decision making.Computers & Industrial Engineering, 61(1), pp.32-38.

Wilson, F.M., 2013. Organizational behaviour and work: a critical introduction. Oxford University Press.

Wu, Z. and Pagell, M., 2011. Balancing priorities: Decision-making in sustainable supply chain management. Journal of Operations Management,29(6), pp.577-590.

Yu, L. and Lai, K.K., 2011. A distance-based group decision-making methodology for multi-person multi-criteria emergency decision support.Decision Support Systems, 51(2), pp.307-315.

Zimmerman, J.L. and Yahya-Zadeh, M., 2011. Accounting for decision making and control. Issues in Accounting Education, 26(1), pp.258-259.