Exam 11: Decision Making

Suzie Desouza, the Manager of Industrial Relations at Zeta Manufacturing, has just come from a ten-hour marathon meeting with the union negotiators who represent the workers in the assembly plant.The union leaders have tabled their final offer and are threatening to call a strike if management does not accept it.Suzie now has to meet with her boss, Gordon Wong, and brief him on the union's final offer.Suzie is hopeful that Gordon will accept the union's terms, but she is not sure how to frame the cost arguments in order to achieve this objective.In her meeting with Gordon the next morning she summarizes the impact of the union's offer as follows: "If we accept their offer, it will cost us an extra $10 million over the next three years.However, if we reject their offer, there's a 50 percent chance that it will cost us more than $10 million, perhaps as much as $20 million; but also a 50 percent chance that it will cost us less, perhaps much less." Do you think Gordon will accept or reject the union's offer? Use your knowledge of framing bias to explain why.

________ refers to the tendency to seek out information that conforms to one's own definition of or solution to a problem.

Ill-structured problems can entail high risk and stimulate political considerations.

Decision makers who establish an adequate level of acceptability for a solution and then screen solutions until one that exceeds this level is found are

________ has been applied to solving diverse problems.

The tendency to ignore or harbor negative attitudes toward ideas from outside one's own organization or project team is known as the confirmation bias.

Decision makers are often dependent on others to ________ their decisions.

Satisficing refers to making the best possible decision that can be made.

What is it called when multiple independent research studies are summarized in a systematic way?

Which of the following is an example of faulty hindsight?

Paying people their salaries is a structured problem, putting into place the Phoenix system to do this was an unstructured problem.

When Thelma's boss said, "What we have here is a morale problem," what was she doing?

The manager who wishes to diffuse responsibility for a potentially incorrect decision should

Whistle-blowers often report that they were motivated by emotion to protest decision errors.

The term "big data" is not exactly a(n)________ term.

Discuss the effect of mood on decision making.What kind of decisions are most likely to be affected by mood, and what does research reveal about moods and decision making?

The term ________ refers to copious amounts of information that are often collected in real time and can come from a wide variety of sources, particularly digital.

Big data tends to be well structured and easily incorporated into standard databases.

What sources of evidence are most useful for identifying a problem and when developing, choosing, and implementing solutions?

What do volume, velocity, and variety have to do with?