Decision making

When intuition doesn’t work out it’s because it wasn’t intuition. One of the common errors is the inability to differentiate between ‘true intuition’ and something that feels similar but what is actually guided by our emotional prejudices.
Emotion based decision making has serious disadvantages. An option may seem appealing because you are actually being influenced by what you crave or what you are familiar with based on past experience. The latter is a strong factor in recruitment.
Suppose you need to decide whom to hire for a job. If you are prejudiced against people of a particular sex, age, or ethnicity, then what you believe is your intuition will tell you not to hire them, even if they have better qualifications for doing the job well. It is difficult to determine introspectively whether your intuitions derive from reliable or irrelevant information and emotional prejudice formed from past experience. With research indicating that 40% of executive hires fail, with costly consequences, this is an area where intuition can make a major difference in your profitability.

Scott and Bruce (1995) building on work by Driver (1979) and Driver et al. (1990)
described decision making style as “the learned, habitual response pattern exhibited by an individual when confronted with a decision situation” .
They were concerned less with the demands of the decision task and environment and more with individual differences in decision making behaviour, in doing so, they identified five decision making styles.

(1) Rational: logical and structured approaches to decision making;
(2) Intuitive: reliance upon hunches, feelings and impressions;
(3) Dependent: reliance upon the direction and support of others;
(4) Avoidant: postponing or avoiding making decisions;
(5) Spontaneous: impulsive and prone to making “snap” or “spur of the moment”
decisions.
Who can see which of these styles is the most effective?  In practice, experienced managers should be able to demonstrate a flexibility in thinking which enables the most effective style to be used in the most relevant situation.

Did you find this useful? Then share it!