ETHICAL DECISION MAKING IN ORGANIZATIONS:

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All managers and not only they, everybody have to take decisions everyday for every reason, that’s why talk about Decision Making is very important in all senses.

Sometimes, the decision maker have a lot of time to tale a decision, so he or she has a determined time to take the decision, it is a Programmed Decision, but there are other circumstances in which the decision have to be made in few minutes, so he cannot think about all consequences each alternative has, so this is called an Unprogrammed Decision.

When you have a Programmed Decision to make, you should follow a process, to take the best decision. First able is necessary to recognize the problem and accept there are a need of take a decision and identify the objective of the decision. Then manager has to make an evaluation and diagnose the situation, to list alternatives and select the best one. Finally they have to implement the decision and follow it up. The decision must be acceptable by all individuals to be a effective decision making.

There are also models of decision making, according to the personality of decision makers, there are a Rational Model (the ones who wants to optimize outcomes), Bounded Rationality (choose first alternative that is good enough), or the theory of Garbage Can (free decision making).

Most of the times Decision Makings are a participative task, I mean when there are a lot of people affected, and all of these people choose an alternative together, and sometimes there are also Individual Decisions, mostly of the times when there are just only an affected individual or when is a leader taking a decision for all the group (despite there was a leader is recommendable to have a decision according to more than one individual point of view).

In decision making are a lot of risks that managers or persons have to take, but some people prefer to adverse risk because they prefer to not loose even though they have the possibility to win much more.

When is a group trying to solve or reach for the best decision, they should choose one of the variety of techniques that exist. Those techniques are: Brain Storming (lot of ideas), NGT (generate good alternatives), Delphi (search for expert’s opinion), Devil’s Advocacy (avoid bad results caused by group pressures also called GROUPTHINK), Dialectical Inquiry (debate between two opposing sets).

In decision making managers have to care about their ethical behavior instead of avoid probable dangerous consequences. So it is relevant to understand two principal concepts that people used to relate but they are very different, Moral and Ethics. Moral is values and principles inside a person, moral vary depends on the beliefs of each individual, unlike Ethics that is a general concept about behavioral norms inside a certain society, and there are also a concept that is related to both previous concepts, it is Social Responsibility that is an obligation of behavior inside an organization, this concept is related to the behavior inside a company and families.

But what we most care about is Ethical Behavior that is behavior individuals take in certain organization or certain society. So there are some qualities required for individuals inside an organization, first able they have to identify ethical issues, and evaluate each concept, be self-confidence, and have willingness to make decisions.

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QUESTION:

What are the impacts of culture in terms of mixed-motive decision making?

It’s difficult to believe, but Cultural factor should impact in all human’s life, much even more on Decisions making.

 When there was a multicultural group in a certain organization its more probable the existence of decisions making problems rather than in a group monocultural. It’s occurs because different culture means different beliefs, and that means different points of view, as a conclusion, its hardest to getting in line. I don’t mean that is impossible to reach an agreement when there is a multicultural group, because as we can see in this chapter, there are a lot of ways to get a decision. And I don’t want to say that if there is a monocultural group, there wasn’t going to be problems on getting the decision, because all decisions making have rigor.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

·         Nelson,D.L.& Quick,J.L (2010) Organizational Behaavior: Science, The real World and you. South-Western College Publication

·         Nelson, Debra L. and Quick, James Campell. 2010, Organizational Behavior- Science, the real World and you; South- Western Cengage, Learning, Mason, USA, Chapter 5