Decision-Making Approaches in Decision Making Decision-Making Forms

¶ … Decision-Making Approaches in decision making Decision-making forms a very significant component of success at work, at the same time it can be the cause of failure if the conditions are wrong and if those involved are not on the same page. Confusion with regard to decision-making can cause conflict to teams, supervisors, managers, and team leaders. There are various decision-making approaches that can be adopted depending on the situations, these include: consensus, majority vote, minority (subcommittee), expert, authority with discussion, and authority without discussion (Eisenfuhr, 2011).

This will describe the 'consensus' and 'expert' approaches of decision-making with respect to the scenario selected. In the consensus or group decision-making approach, the manager becomes part of the team and involves everyone who is willing and ready to contribute in the decision-making process. The fact that the word consensus is used does not signify that all those involved fully agree with whatever decision is reached, it just requires those in disagreement to wholly support the decision without considering their disagreement (Eisenfuhr, 2011).

This is an approach that is recommended for decisions that have a lot of importance in an organization and where there is enough time for the process. To apply this approach in this scenario, the infection control officer will involve all the administrators equally and together they would come to a decision that they all support. On the other hand, in the expert decision-making approach an internal or external subject matter expert is designated and given the mandate to make the decision which is then adopted by the manager (Eisenfuhr, 2011).

This kind of approach is appropriate where the decision-making process is complex and highly technical in nature. The designated expert therefore makes decisions considering the expert analysis that shall have been carried out and this is usually in form of an advice to the organization. The major setback associated with this approach is on choosing the expert since the team members will then feel excluded.

It should however be appreciated that where technical opinion is necessary it would be inappropriate to involve all the team members regardless of their expertise in a bid to include everyone. Relating it to this scenario, the infection control officer will select a team of medical experts, who are not necessarily among the administrators, to analyze the situation and come up with a decision that would be effective in reducing the infection rates.

The nursing home administrators will then adopt the decision that will be chosen by the expert team and initiate the implementation. There are advantages and disadvantages associated with the consensus or group decision-making approach. There are several merits of this decision-making process, but two come out conspicuously, that of synergy, and sharing of information (Bubnicki, 2003). Synergy is achieved when many minds come together in the decision-making process to achieve a specific outcome. The assumption here is that the more the ideas, the higher the quality of the decision.

The aspect of sharing information among group members is also a plus in this approach, and with proper execution better informed decisions can be achieved. This argument is based on the fact that each group member has a unique idea and when all these unique ideas are captured, an all inclusive decision is reached at.