Most Important Dimensions That Go Into Making Decisions

Adolescent Decision-Making Adolescents have a lot of social and personal temptations to either resist or to experiment with, including the following: smoking, using drugs, using alcohol, unsafe driving stunts, getting involved in crime, unsafe sexual practices, and other risky behaviors. These personal decisions of course impact the individual adolescents, but they also impact the greater society, according to a journal article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

Positive Attribute: If adolescents could get control of behaviors and avoid those practices that are unhealthy, it could "…set a different lifetime pattern" but also this avoidance and making better choices could have a "…broad impact" in terms of reducing crime, and in terms of reducing "the burdens of disease, injury, human suffering and association economic costs" (Reyna, et al., 2006). Still, getting control of bad behaviors would be a positive attribute of adolescence.

Negative Attribute: One of the problems that the authors point out when suggesting that adolescents (and society) would be better off if adolescents could avoid risky behaviors, is that healthy behaviors could "conflict" with what the adolescent's goals are, Reyna explains on page 1. The goals of adolescents are often to just have as much fun as possible.

The authors assert that a goal of many adolescents is to "maximize immediate pleasure" and so using drugs and drinking would be considered a young person's way of exploring those things that bring immediate pleasure (Reyna, 1). It is easy to see the point that the authors are making. In short, for many adolescents positive experiences include having fun, rebelling, following the crowd and being an important link in the peer group's goals of pleasure.

When adults, teachers, counselors suggest that these activities should be curtailed, adolescents often resist taking that advice because it means taking away the fun they are having, and so what adolescents see as "positive" (smoking marijuana, driving fast, drinking beer) often turns out to be "negative" (developing a drug habit is a bad idea; speed causes deadly accidents; and alcohol opens up the possibility of terrible outcomes).

The four Most Important Dimensions of Decision-Making When it comes to leadership, there are four distinct ways in which decisions could be and should be made. Of course not everyone is a "leader" in the social sense of the word, but everyone has leadership opportunities, in the home (good parenting is leadership), at school (teachers, administrators, and student elected to leadership positions), and at work (showing the way for better performance is leadership).

Using a Forbes' article on top four decision-making styles (or dimensions), the first decision-making style is "command decision-making," which is a style that needs no consulting with others (Gleeson, 2012). Sometimes decisions must be made on the spot; for example, in my own experience, I have been the driver of a car that suddenly was confronted with another car swerving into my lane; I took command of the situation and jerked the wheel sharply to the right, entering a grassy field without colliding with the oncoming car.

The second dimension (style) is "collaborative decision-making," which is just what it seems to be -- leaders bring people together to discuss what should be done. As a teacher I had a problem student (who was a bully and used violence to get his way) and asked other teachers (who also had this student) how they were handling this boy. That was collaborative and a decision was made to call his parents in to explain why we were suspending him.

The third style is "consensus decision-making" -- which means that everyone involved in the potential decision must agree on a solution. In that incident.