Decision Making As An Important Aspect In Every Organization

Introduction

An organization develops in course of time with complexities. With increasing complexities, decision making in organizations has become a difficult task. Decision making is a complex process which depends not only on the personal qualities of managers but also on the specific characteristics of problems, available resources, etc. Starting an Agile adoption in a larger organization is always a stepwise approach. Agile is not about processes and tools, but about individuals and their interactions when they collaborate in a certain ecosystem. So even if you employ a revolutionary approach with some teams or products, the organization will change step by step. One of the inevitable side effects of this stepwise adoption is the coexistence of traditional and agile cultures within the same organization. This usually leads to typical friction and conflicts.

Literature Review

Decision making is one of the most important aspects of any organization work, because through them complex situations are concluded. As organizations’ activities are dynamic in their nature, decision should be made constantly. In the contemporary business world, many companies have layers and layers of hierarchy where decisions are made at the top and passed down to the rank and file employees. This gives rise to organizational structures that are vertically deep and horizontally broad with spans of control extending to several layers in both ways. However, most companies in today’s world were still organized by traditional organizational approach which was invented 100 years ago. The traditional hierarchy approach helped may organizations to become more productive.

In traditional hierarchy approach, formal leaders were appointed with assigned responsibilities and authority to make decisions. As the world has developed faster and quite different from the time the traditional hierarchy approach is invented, many organizations were struggling to cope up with the fast paced world. As the world has developed faster, with increased speed in information available making a decision has become challenging.

Organizations which use traditional hierarchy approach for decision making assumed that even in the fasted paced world and information available, managers will be able to make sound decisions. But, this is not true. The emergence in the internet and mobile technologies there is tons of information available with good and fault information. Gathering all the information available and filtering out the information that makes sense to situation to take a high quality decision is a bigger challenge for managers. It’s due to speed of information available exceeded human capability indirectly referring to organizational capabilities. This takes too much time in our fast paced world to get all decisions and approved. As an effect, informal leaders emerged from the people in the lower level of hierarchy and started to make decisions with in the team without approval of formal appointed managers. Due to this there can be disconnection, frustration and misalignment when official managers overrule the decisions made by informal leaders which in turn makes the organization low.

Empirical Analysis

Using traditional hierarchy, it’s difficult to cope with the increasing speed in today’s world because, for every decision, you need to get approved from the formal managers. By doing so managers will be overloaded with requests for decisions and waiting for guidance which in turns leads slow decision making.

So, to gain speed in decision making process, organizations needs to empower people to act and take decisions locally and autonomously. When you authority to every individual in an organization to act and take decisions autonomously, you can think that there may be big chaos that can affect the organization a high level, but there will be not any if alignment is achieved in the teams and people on the overall vision and direction. This is where agile management comes into play. The ultimate solution for many organizations looking to untangle their decision making is to become flatter and more agile, with decision authority and accountability going hand in hand. The balance between autonomy and alignment is one of the key-factors in any agile organization which enable the speed of adapting the information available and situations. Agile methodology primary goal is to enable fact actions in dynamic and complex situations. It uses team collaborations to ensure communications and create alignment. There will be daily updates or weekly updates on how much work is done so that everyone on the team can be aware of situation. It’s also important to develop tacking and feedback mechanisms to judge the success of decisions. By doing so the next decision will be made wisely and could be able to get a chance to correct the way of making a decision.

Conclusion

In conclusion, decision making has to be according to the needs of the situation and must balance the competing interests for the same resource and must be based on taking everyone on board. Only then would the decisions be truly democratic. So, every organization should be recommended to ensure that certain autonomy is given to the employees in the middle layers as well as those slightly senior so that decision making need not be centralized. This helps the organizations to democratize the decision making process wherein the autonomy enjoyed by the middle managers and the rank and file employees ensures their wholehearted participation in the implementation of the decisions. Companies, that learn how to distribute decision making and make it more effective, have a significantly better chance to keep up with today’s speed and thus be commercially successful.