Decision Making Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Correct answer: proactive

A proactive decision anticipates the change and acts before it arrives; a reactive one responds after the fact. The distinction is about timing relative to the event rather than about how the decision is reached, so a proactive decision may be intuitive or systematic.

Answer: A

Correct answer: bounded rationality.

Bounded rationality names the whole set of limits on the decision maker: the information available, the time and resources, the organisation’s constraints, and the individual’s own capacity and values. Total rationality would require all of them to be absent, which is never the case.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Administrative

Simon’s administrative model describes how managers actually decide rather than how they would if the rational assumptions held: with limited information, limited time and limited capacity to process what they have. Bounded rationality and satisficing are its two central ideas, and they earned him the Nobel prize in economics.

Answer: C

Correct answer: top management.

Non-programmed decisions are novel, unstructured and consequential, so they reach the level with the authority and the perspective to take them. The corresponding point is that programmed decisions should be pushed downward - a senior manager spending time on them is spending it on work that a rule could do.

Answer: D

Correct answer: all of the above

The research has looked at three kinds of variable together: the personality of the decision maker, the situation in which the decision is taken, and the interaction between the two. The last is what makes the field difficult - the same person decides differently in different circumstances.

Answer: C

Correct answer: planning

Planning is the step at which goals are set, alternatives predicted and the goals communicated to those who must act on them. Control is its counterpart, covering implementation and the feedback from it - and the two together form the cycle within which decisions are made and learned from.

Answer: B

Correct answer: impact

The three dimensions used to rank problems are urgency, how soon attention is needed; impact, how serious the effects are; and growth tendency, how quickly the problem will worsen if left. A problem may be urgent without being important, which is why the dimensions are assessed separately.

Answer: D

Correct answer: intuitive

Intuition here is not the absence of reasoning but reasoning that has become automatic through experience, so the decision maker reaches a judgement without being able to set out the steps. It is fast and often good in a familiar domain, and unreliable outside one.

Answer: D

Correct answer: all of the above

All three arise. A crisis demands immediate attention; a routine problem recurs and is handled by procedure; and a missed opportunity is a problem too, though a less visible one. The third is the easiest to overlook, since nothing has gone wrong - something has merely not gone right.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Expectations

March’s garbage can model identifies four streams flowing independently through an organisation: problems, solutions, participants and choice opportunities. A decision happens when they happen to coincide. Expectations is not among them - and the absence of anything so orderly is the point of the model.