Decision-Making Decision-making is an important feature of leadership and management in any sector. Various approaches to effective decision-making have been developed and discussed by researchers over the years. This paper will discuss the rational decision-making model, how individuals can deal with biases and errors in decision making, how individual differences and organizational constraints affect decision making, and what ethical considerations should be made in decision making.

The Rational decision-making model consists of a number of steps designed to enable the individual to make an efficient and effective decision based on evidence and logic. The first step in the model is to define the situation and the decision that has to be made. This means that individual must understand the issue and what is at stake by being able to answer what is the problem and what is the decision that has to be made? The second step consists of identifying the most important criteria for judging the outcome of the decision and whether it is right or not—i.e., the individual must be able to tell if the decision will be effective in terms of addressing the issue. The third step consists of identifying all possible solutions and options for addressing the problem. The fourth step is to make the actual calculations with respect to each option in order to see whether it would actually satisfy the criteria. The fifth step is to choose the option that is found by calculation to be likely...

When two African-American men were arrested for loitering outside a Starbucks after being refused permission to use the bathroom since they had not purchased anything, Starbucks’ CEO made the decision to open all Starbucks’ bathrooms to the public regardless of whether the person was a paying customer or not. This was Starbucks’ attempt to address a problem directly rather than to simply apologize. Using the rational decision making model, the CEO would have first identified the problem, which in this case was not really related to bathroom policy but rather to escalation through fear in an incident that really never should have involved the police. There was a racial bias beneath the fear, which prompted the call to the police but had nothing to do with the bathroom policy which was based on the individuals not being paying customers. To change policy based on incorrect criteria showed that the CEO did not apply the rational decision making model to this problem. Instead, the CEO was attempting to correct for racial bias by opening bathrooms to all people so that such a mistake would not occur in the future—but this will have consequences as well as Conklin (2018) notes.
Biases and errors…