Question

Case Two   Decision Making   

You have been asked to personally recommend a new benefits company to handle all the company benefits and pension for your organization of 500 staff. One of your colleagues, who is responsible for the project management, suggests that the best way to decide is to use a mathematical matrix and a set of pre-established factors that prospective companies can be scored against.

Question:

• What decision- making approach is your colleague recommending? Is this recommendation a good idea in this situation? Why or why not?

Answer 1

The decision making approach that my colleague is recommending is the use of rational choice paradigm.

In this approach, the idea that relevant factors should first be identified and also weighted is a good idea. This is because, this will help us to be able to think critical on the issues concerning these factors and the factors which are the most important ones in the company before making the final decision. These factors important to the company includes speed of service, costs, quality of services offered in our company among others. This approach is important because, it considers the choice behaviour of one or more individuals involved in the decision making units as the individual decision making units being focused upon becomes a typical representation of a larger group

However, the suggestion of arriving at best solutionmathematically as recommended by my colleague is not a good idea but a misleading one. This is because, it will be very difficult to choose alternatives because of many reasons. These reasons may include; the decision makers may be having limited information in processing abilities, may be difficult for them to evaluate the decision against implied favourites and the decision being arrived upon may be influenced by emptions. Therefore, it will require critical thinking an evaluation before arriving at the best alternative