Barriers To Effective Decision Making By A Manager In An Organization
1. Psychological Biases
2. Time Pressure
3. Social Realities
1. Psychological Biases
This occurs due to emotional biasness of a manager in making decisions. The
manager focuses on subjective facts, which are based on personal’s emotional biases,
rather than objective facts, which are based on rationality and reality.
Psychological biases may include the following:
(i) Illusion of Control
It is occurred when there is a belief that a person can influence and
control the happening of an event, but in reality, he has no control over it.
For example, if the manager is taking the high risks (e.g., made heavy
investments) and believes that he can control their results, the he is making a bias
decision as it is his own views but in reality, he can’t control the results of
high risks and this may be resulted in the failure of business. So, he must
take minimum and calculated risk in order to manage and run the business in a comfort zone.
(ii) Framing Effects
When a decision is presented or phrased in such a way that affects its
shaping and framing. For example, the two statements “80% chance of success”
and “20% chance of loss” presented to a manager affects his decision-making process
as first statement encourages him to invest in a project and second statement
may discourage him to invest as this includes a small figure “20”, besides the results
of two statements are the same.
The manager may take the same decision due to the framing of similar past situation
but in rationality, it is not the case. For example, he may decide to invest in
the project as he did in the past for 10 years, but not considering the current
and future aspects of the market i.e., the demand for such project is
decreasing in the market currently and after 1 year, investing in such project
will be a loss.
(iii) Discount The Future
It is occurred when people favor and prefer short-term costs and benefits
over long-term costs and benefits. For example, to avoid cost of research &
development, cost of purchasing new equipment, etc., give the short-term
benefits but in the long-term, it costs to the business due to the lack of
innovation and competitive advantage in the new market place as new technological
improvements are required to meet market’s demands and hence the company loses
long-term benefits i.e., decrease in sales, lose customers, facing difficulties to expand the business, etc.
2. Time Pressure
When the manager makes decisions under time pressure, then there is a need
to make timely decision without losing quality, but he is in hurry to make quick
decisions due to dynamic environment, so he don’t do analysis and resolve conflict
& make decision without consensus. In this way, he may made mistakes which
resulted in the poor performance of management.
In order to make timely and quality decisions, he should rely on daily reports,
experts’ opinions. He should try to resolve the conflict occurred due to
different opinions among team members in order to reach to a solution, otherwise,
the final decision will be taken by executive.
3. Social Realities
In an organization, social interactions, bargaining, and politicking (an activity
undertaken to acquire power and influence the manager for achieving personal
goals) also affect effective decision-making process.
So, the decision made by a manager may be influenced by group interactions which is different from the one made by manager himself to achieve targeted organizational goals. He should make decisions without considering preferences and reactions of the people working in an organization.

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