Exam 7: Decision Making and Creativity

The Director of Nursing is looking for a new work schedule for nurses throughout the hospital.She evaluates a schedule system as soon as she learns about it.Eventually,she finds a schedule that is 'good enough' for her needs,even though there may be better schedules available that she hasn't yet learned about.The Director of Nursing is engaging in:

Two contingencies of employee involvement are decision commitment and risk of conflict.

The view that since decision makers have limited information,limited information processing capabilities,and tend toward satisficing rather than maximization of outcomes when making decisions accords with:

Art classes and improvisational theatre are two creative activities of associative play.

Creativity occurs only in a few types of decisions.

The ideas that form during the insight stage of creativity need to be verified through conscious evaluation and experimentation.

The highest level of employee involvement occurs when employees are asked to make recommendations to managers,who then decide whether to implement them.

The rational choice model of decision making is impossible to apply in reality because:

You have just received seed money for a new Internet business and you want to hire a dozen people with a lot of creative potential.To hire the most creative people,you would select applicants who:

Incubation is the stage of creativity in which the problem is simmering at the back of your mind while you are doing something else.

Knowledge and experience can undermine creativity,because it can lead to routinization of that knowledge.

Insight and verification are:

The rational choice paradigm states that effective decision makers begin at any step in the model.

Divergent thinking occurs when the individual has a fleeting inspiration that is usually forgotten before it can be written down.

If a decision maker encounters the same problem several times,he or she can increasingly rely on nonprogrammed decision routines to solve the problem.

Representativeness heuristics is a natural tendency to pay less attention to whether something resembles something else than on more precise statistics about its probability.

A nonprogrammed decision is:

A consumer products company wants more creativity in its research and development operations.The company has spent lots of money on creativity training sessions.These have helped somewhat,but the vice-president of this area believes that the fundamental conditions must be altered to allow more creativity.Describe three conditions (other than training)that this organization should establish to increase the level of creativity in its research and development operations.For each condition,briefly explain how it might improve creativity.

Decision makers can discover blind spots in problem identification by discussing the situation with other people.

According to almost all organizational behaviour research,intuitive decision making causes us to make wrong decisions.