Rational Decisions in Organisations

Rational Decisions in Organisations
Author: Frédéric Adam
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2022-05-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000543102

Managers in organisations must make rational decisions. Rational decision making is the opposite of intuitive decision making. It is a strict procedure utilising objective knowledge and logic. It involves identifying the problem to solve, gathering facts, identifying options and outcomes, analysing them, considering all the relationships and selecting the decision. Rational decision making requires support: methods and software tools. The identification of the problem to solve needs methods that would measure and evaluate the current situation. Identification and evaluation of options and analysis of the available possibilities involves analysis and optimisation methods. Incorporating intuition into rational decision making needs adequate methods that would translate ideas or observed behaviours into hard data. Communication, observation and opinions recording is hardly possible today without adequate software. Information and data that form the input, intermediate variables and the output must be stored, managed and made accessible in a user-friendly manner. Rational Decisions in Organisations: Theoretical and Practical Aspects presents selected recent developments in the support of the widely understood rational decision making in organisations, illustrated through case studies. The book shows not only the variety of perspectives involved in decision making, but also the variety of domains where rational decision support systems are needed. The case studies present decision making by medical doctors, students and managers of various universities, IT project teams, construction companies, banks and small and large manufacturing companies. Covering the richness of relationships in which the decisions should and must be taken, the book illustrates how modern organisations operate in chains and networks; they have multiple responsibilities, including social, legal, business and ethical duties. Nowadays, managers in organisations can make transparent decisions and consider a multitude of stakeholders and their diverse features, incorporating diverse criteria, using multiple types and drivers of information and decision-making patterns, and referring to numerous lessons learned. As the book makes clear, the marriage of theoretical ideas with the possibilities offered by technology can make the decisions in organisations more rational and, at the same time, more human.

Extendable Rationality

Extendable Rationality
Author: Davide Secchi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2010-10-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 144197542X

“How do people make decisions in organizations?” is the question at the core of this book. Do people act rationally? Under what conditions can information and knowledge be shared to improve decision making? Davide Secchi applies concepts and theories from cognitive science, organizational behavior, and social psychology to explore the dynamics of decision making. In particular, he integrates “bounded rationality” (people are only partly rational; they have (a) limited computational capabilities and (b) limited access to information) and “distributed cognition” (knowledge is not confined to an individual, but is distributed across the members of a group) to build upon the pioneering work of Herbert Simon (1916-2001) on rational decision making and contribute fresh insights. This book is divided into two parts. The first part (Chapters 2 to 5) explores how recent studies on biases, prospect theory, heuristics, and emotions provide the so-called “map” of bounded rationality. The second part (Chapter 6 to 8) presents the idea of extendable rationality. In this section, Secchi identifies the limitations of bounded rationality and focuses more heavily on socially-based decision processes and the role of “docility” in teaching, managing, and executing decisions in organizations. The practical implications extend broadly to issues relating to change and innovation, as organizations adapt to evolving market conditions, implementing new systems, and effectively managing limited resources. The final chapter outlines an agenda for future research to help understand the decision making characteristics and capabilities of an organization.

Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance

Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance
Author: Ali Farazmand
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 13623
Release: 2023-04-05
Genre: Law
ISBN: 3030662527

This global encyclopedic work serves as a comprehensive collection of global scholarship regarding the vast fields of public administration, public policy, governance, and management. Written and edited by leading international scholars and practitioners, this exhaustive resource covers all areas of the above fields and their numerous subfields of study. In keeping with the multidisciplinary spirit of these fields and subfields, the entries make use of various theoretical, empirical, analytical, practical, and methodological bases of knowledge. Expanded and updated, the second edition includes over a thousand of new entries representing the most current research in public administration, public policy, governance, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, and management covering such important sub-areas as: 1. organization theory, behavior, change and development; 2. administrative theory and practice; 3. Bureaucracy; 4. public budgeting and financial management; 5. public economy and public management 6. public personnel administration and labor-management relations; 7. crisis and emergency management; 8. institutional theory and public administration; 9. law and regulations; 10. ethics and accountability; 11. public governance and private governance; 12. Nonprofit management and nongovernmental organizations; 13. Social, health, and environmental policy areas; 14. pandemic and crisis management; 15. administrative and governance reforms; 16. comparative public administration and governance; 17. globalization and international issues; 18. performance management; 19. geographical areas of the world with country-focused entries like Japan, China, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe, North America; and 20. a lot more. Relevant to professionals, experts, scholars, general readers, researchers, policy makers and manger, and students worldwide, this work will serve as the most viable global reference source for those looking for an introduction and advance knowledge to the field.

Linking Expertise and Naturalistic Decision Making

Linking Expertise and Naturalistic Decision Making
Author: Eduardo Salas
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2001-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1135659915

Naturalistic Decision Making is an important area of research in applied psychology. This book comes from selected topics at the 1998 conference on NDM, held in Virginia.

Rational Choice Theory and Organizational Theory

Rational Choice Theory and Organizational Theory
Author: Mary Zey
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 156
Release: 1998
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780803951365

Rational Choice Theory and Organizational Theory is written in response to the neo-classical economic rational choice theories and organizational economic theories which have emerged in the past decade and gained center stage in current organizational analysis.

Organizational Decision Making

Organizational Decision Making
Author: Zur Shapira
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2002-03-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521890502

Explores decision making in organizations, highlighting the roles of incentive, conflict, power and politics.

Strategic Decisions

Strategic Decisions
Author: Vassilis Papadakis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1461561957

Over the past ten years, there has been growing interest in the process of strategic decision-making among both managers and researchers. Strategic decisions are important for five main reasons: They are large-scale, risky and hard to reverse; they are a bridge between deliberate and emerging strategies; they can be a major source of organizational learning; they play an important part in the development of individual managers and they cut accross functions and academic disciplines. Strategic Decisions summarizes the current state of the art in research on strategic decision-making, with chapters prepared by leading strategy researchers. The editors also present implications for current application and proposed directions for future research.

Bounded Rationality

Bounded Rationality
Author: Gerd Gigerenzer
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2002-07-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262571647

In a complex and uncertain world, humans and animals make decisions under the constraints of limited knowledge, resources, and time. Yet models of rational decision making in economics, cognitive science, biology, and other fields largely ignore these real constraints and instead assume agents with perfect information and unlimited time. About forty years ago, Herbert Simon challenged this view with his notion of "bounded rationality." Today, bounded rationality has become a fashionable term used for disparate views of reasoning. This book promotes bounded rationality as the key to understanding how real people make decisions. Using the concept of an "adaptive toolbox," a repertoire of fast and frugal rules for decision making under uncertainty, it attempts to impose more order and coherence on the idea of bounded rationality. The contributors view bounded rationality neither as optimization under constraints nor as the study of people's reasoning fallacies. The strategies in the adaptive toolbox dispense with optimization and, for the most part, with calculations of probabilities and utilities. The book extends the concept of bounded rationality from cognitive tools to emotions; it analyzes social norms, imitation, and other cultural tools as rational strategies; and it shows how smart heuristics can exploit the structure of environments.

Successful Decision-making

Successful Decision-making
Author: Rudolf Grünig
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2006-03-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3540275037

Unlike other publications on decision making, the book focuses on discovering the problem, analyzing it and on developing and assessing solution options. One whole chapter describes a case study. It illustrates how the proposed decision making procedure is used in practice. Executives get an approach to systematically and successfully solving complex problems.