HR essay on: Personal Reflection on Decision Making at Workplace
Introduction
Decision making is an important part of the management processes and is considered as a key skill at the workplace as well as other scenarios where critical decisions are to be taken. It is integral for attaining success at the workplace and in life (Jaeger, 2001). There must be adequate knowledge, objectivity and commitment. If decision making can lead to success at work, it can also lead to failure at times if the conditions at the time of decision making were not right and there is misfit between what is required to be done and what has been done. A successful, productive and efficient decision making at the workplace involves adequate knowledge of oneself and the group, gathering data, evaluating data, selection and development of plan. It is important to focus on the interest and not on positions, allowing for mutual gain and acceptance of the objective criteria (Sanderson & Gruen, 2006).
When one works in a group, there is requirement of making productive and positive decisions together. A systematic approach is required for decision making so that decisions could be taken with confidence no matter what type of decisions has to be taken (Shapira, 2002). The combination of confidence with the ability to listen to others and learn from them is the key to increase the decision-making abilities over a period of time (Phillips & Gully, 2011).
The essay reflects the critical personal reflection on decision making in a scenario with discussion on what issues emerged during the situations and the decisions made and how they could have been dealt with the use of models and frameworks related to decision making process.
Scenario
I worked as an intern in XYZ Company in the HR department and my role was to assist the manager in its HR activities, such as recruitment, selection, making performance sheets and making checklists for determining the performance of the employees on the sheet. I was gaining a good knowledge regarding the methods and activities involved in functioning and processes of human resource department. My manager was very experienced and had a good knowledge of the processes and function of the human resource department. I had the responsibility of doing job analysis by helping my supervisor in setting job description and job specification, making spreadsheets for salary and selecting appropriate candidates out of the pool of applicants for the desired posts in the organization.
In one situation, I had to work with my supervisor to select a candidate for a post that required prior experience in the same field. I worked on making calls to potential applicants, inviting them to appear for the aptitude tests and undertaking preliminary interview. One candidate passed the preliminary interview and was selected for the second round of interview. He had 1.5 years of experience in the related field but not the exact field for which the applications were invited. But, as he did well in the test and based on his interview, he was selected. As salary was negotiable, he was appointed for a good amount of remuneration based on his prior experience and his excel in the work. However, I did not take the decision of appointing the candidate to the post, but I was involved in the decision making process as I had to inquire about the situation with my supervisor regarding the negotiations.
The decision of appointing the candidate for the concerned post at negotiable remunerations did not prove to have satisfactory outcomes. The performance of the employee was poor and he was not able to show his excellence in the related field. At the time of appraisal of newly selected employees few months after, the manager ignored the fact that the performance of the employee was below expectations. Instead, he recalled the time recently when the employee showed good performance. The issue can be subjected to the availability heuristic. The risk with this bias in decision making is that the manager’s decision of rating the employee on average performance based on his recent performance ignores the true picture of the overall performance of the employee during the whole period (Keller, Siegrist & Gutscher, 2006).
The issue related to the situation is that of availability bias in decision making. Availability bias is the tendency of people to place their judgments on the basis of the information that is readily and recently available to them (Gilovich, Griffin & Kahneman, 2002). Events that have occurred more recently have the tendency to remain more available in the memory of people. Another organizational constraint on decision making related to the scenario mentioned is historical precedents. The decisions made in the past affect the choices available today and the decisions that are to be made today (Keller, Siegrist & Gutscher, 2006). The manager, in the present scenario discussed, made the decision of selecting the candidate in the past, and is now confident that he has made the best hiring decision regardless of the evidences that show the opposite situation.
The decision making of the manager regarding the performance appraisal of newly hired employees particularly the candidate that consistently shows poor performance on records is an issue that led to not so satisfactory outcomes in terms of giving performance ratings.
Decision making models and errors
The decision maker has to make consistent, rational and value maximizing choices within the specified organizational or personal constraints. These decisions follow a six step model which is called a rational decision making model. The model relies on a number of assumptions. These assumptions are: the decision maker is possessed with complete information; he is able to identify all the relevant options and that too in an unbiased manner; and chooses the option that has the best utility. However, in practical context, the decision makers do not follow the exact model. They look at few options and choose the one that appears to be the most satisfactory (Robbins, 2010). This process comes under bounded rationality in which the human mind cannot formulate and then solve the problems in a full rational way. The decision maker captures the simplified model and then makes the decision within confined understanding of complex problems that can lead to satisfactory outcomes (Champoux, 2010).
The rational decision making model comprises of six steps. These six steps include defining the problem, identification of the decision criteria, allocation of weights to the criteria, development of alternatives, evaluation of alternatives and selection of the best alternative. These six steps are having its assumptions as mentioned above. Following these steps to make the decision suitable and right in the given situation demands simplification of the complexities of the situations so as to come at the satisfactory outcomes (Robbins, 2010). If this framework had been studied at the situation I faced at the workplace, I could have understood the assumptions of the model in real context and the limitations in making the decision.
Understanding of the theoretical concept of availability bias at the time of making the decision of giving moderate rating to the candidate in performance appraisal by the manager could have could have solved the problem of decision making in performance appraisal (Gilovich, Griffin & Kahneman, 2002). Knowledge of the factor of availability bias can solve the problem of understanding of the overall performance of the employee. As it would have been known that availability bias could occur in the decision making process, and to avoid this risk, more frequent feedback to employees could be provided and giving the feedback shortly after the occurrence of the negative behavior or outcome (Griffin & Moorhead, 2011).
Theory and application of models
The rational action theory of Simon suggests that managers tend to remain rational in their decision making, but the fact is that the problems are very complex in nature. It is the natural tendency of humans to simplify the situations heavily (Schermerhorn, 2011). The manager continually accumulates the information even before the problem arises, and uses this information that is pre accumulated or saved in mind to come at some decision for the problem. Following this model, managers make rational decisions according to them, but without doing formal search for the problem (Sanderson & Gruen, 2006). Implementing this model in the presented scenario, formal search should have been done for the performance appraisal of the newly joined employees, rather than making decision according to the recent performance shown by the employee. Formal search could have avoided the risk of availability heuristics while making the decision of giving rates to the employees, thus leading to satisfactory outcomes (Schermerhorn, 2011).
Another model that can be applied to the decision making process and can increase the understanding of decision making is normative model. This model takes into consideration the fact that decision makers are bound by certain constraints while they make any decision. These constraints involve environmental as well as personal factors which ultimately reduce the rationality, like time, resources and uncertainty (Hastie & Dawes, 2009). The normative heuristics suggests that the decision making process is characterized by limited processing of the information, judgmental heuristics are present while making decisions as they are the shortcuts to the way of simplified decision making, and satisficing which means that the solution that meet the minimum requirements and is good enough as a solution is chosen. The managers make judgments according to their previous experiences so as to speed up the decision making process (Jaeger, 2001).
Knowledge of the normative model can help the managers and the other decision makers to understand the constraints present in front of them in form of limited information and the tendency to use judgmental heuristics (Hastie & Dawes, 2009). Once these constraints are well understood in a decision making situation, better decision could be taken for satisfactory outcomes. In the present case of workplace decision making, the manger’s decision of giving moderate rating to the employee with not so good performance was based on his previous experience of selecting candidates that could prove to be good employees. Therefore, the judgment of the manager is clouded with his prior experiences and the recent performance of the employee ignoring the overall performance (Wagner & Hollenbeck, 2009). Therefore, understanding of the normative model could have improved the situation of decision making, and if I were to make such decision, I would have not foregone the prior performances of the employee, through my understanding of judgmental heuristics and models related to decision making.
Conclusion
Decision making is one of the very important aspects in business organizations as well as in personal life. Decisions made at right place and at right time ensure the success, while wrong decisions can prove to be the cause of failure of organizations as well as failure of the individual at personal level. All the aspects involved in a particular situation should be taken into consideration before making any decision. There are two models and one theory discussed including rational model, normative model, and the rational action theory by Simon, all of which give an idea of presence constraints in decision making and assumptions in decision making process. Understanding of these models and theory increases the understanding of the concept of decision making and how decisions are made in critical and complex situations. The concept of presence of biases such as judgmental biases, and availability heuristics present risk to decision making process that can be done away with formal search of the situation and taking rational decisions that do not take only the recent occurrences or actions into consideration, but also previous actions and occurrences for arriving at decisions that give satisfactory outcomes both at the personal level if personal decisions are made; and at organizational level if managerial decisions are made in context of the workplace. Therefore, the appropriate understanding of the models, theories and concepts related to decision making process can improve the level of decision making, thus making the organization able to achieve the intended outcomes through critical decisions made in complex situations. Good decision making demands understanding of the constraints and gathering of all information related to the situation, so that risk could be avoided and success could be ensured.
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