Editorial

Citation

Rausch, E. (2011), "Editorial", Management Decision, Vol. 49 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/md.2011.00149eaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Management Decision, Volume 49, Issue 5

The focus of this special issue is on ways to help people with and without managerial responsibilities enhance their decision-making skills and, of course, their successes at work and in their private lives. These skills apply in all decisions, not only in important ones but also in the run-of-the-mill decisions that we make day to day – wherever we are and whatever we do. Turning them into habits can have significant influence.

For the person who is new to formal decision-making, this objective requires familiarity with, and use of a sound set of decision-making steps such as: defining the desired outcome, identifying alternatives, collecting information to evaluate the alternatives (which sometimes suggests additional alternatives), evaluating them, and deciding on the most desirable ones.

Then, for improving skills it is necessary to analyze how well each one of these steps is performed now. Here it is useful to look at criteria for excellence. The main one is essentially the same for all steps. It is thoroughness, which requires attention to detail – to ensure that nothing, or as little as possible that deserves consideration, is overlooked in any of the steps. The emphasis here is on “deserves”. What deserves depends on the situation including the information that can reasonably be obtained.

Very often, decision makers do not include all that would be useful to consider when establishing the desired outcome of the decision. Issues that are frequently overlooked pertain to the satisfaction of stakeholders that requires at least appropriate participation, and serious thought to all aspects of effective and thorough communications. If these are not thought of when defining desired outcomes, they may receive less than adequate attention.

Some other decision quality elements may also be ignored, at least occasionally, or they may be inadequately considered. These pertain to the criteria for the selection of alternatives and even more so to their evaluation for the selection of the preferred one. Without a sound list of all items that the decision should satisfy, it is likely that some will be overlooked in both steps.

A few papers address issues pertaining to enhancing decision in a general sense. They include the one on common sense, one on indecision, one on X/Y assumptions and one on application of emotional intelligence skills. The latter attempts to condense the huge literature on the numerous emotions into a practical perspective on what can be done to best apply that skill to decisions.

Most papers in this issue focus primarily on matters that concern managers in specific situations. Still, almost all offer thoughts for enhancing decisions by providing examples of what could be considered for each one of the decision steps, in all environments. The careful reader will notice ideas that apply to decisions that all of us have to make as employees, team members, career planners, family members, and in our leisure activities.

For instance, one paper, whose title does not seem to fit this special issue, is on decision making in online auctions. While it discusses the considerations that should enter the mind of the person in charge of promotional strategy, it offers many insights that can be applied by any manager concerned with stimulating motivation of staff members.

Another paper provides ideas for evaluating alternatives by discussing weighing of attributes. It describes a comprehensive, detailed procedure for comparing alternatives in decisions. This extensive procedure would be warranted only for important organizational issues, but the idea of thinking about weights of attributes can be useful in other decision. In short, readers who look for useful points can gain greater appreciation of considering important attributes (aspects) of alternatives, rather than selecting them in a general way.

Then several papers provide good ideas in the discussions on participative decision making that can affect several decision steps. These papers, as well as others, directly or indirectly touch on the role of emotions, of intuition, and of assumptions, by the decision maker and the group. Thoughts from these and other papers might possibly apply in many personal and non-managerial decisions that have to be made from time to time.

The literature on the various aspects of decision making does not emphasize what could conceivably be considered the most important aspect – the development of greater decision making competence. Where that is covered, it focuses on the technical aspects – procedures and quantitative evaluation techniques. By contrast, this special issue attempts to bring greater awareness of the qualitative aspects of high quality decisions.

Though there was not room for all of them, submissions came, not only from US scholars, but also from the UK, China, Taiwan, and Australia.

Despite the broad conceptual coverage of the topic, many readers may correctly expect that papers in Management Decision should be highly professional, meaning that they should be research oriented. It might therefore be worthwhile here to point out that the call for papers specifically invited a wide range of types:

Papers for this special edition can address research or viewpoints. They can be technical or conceptual papers, case studies, literature reviews, or general reviews.

Without that leeway, it might not have been possible to create a journal issue on enhancing decisions because there are hardly any reports of empirical work on this topic in the literature and because it is so difficult to do such research on an ambiguous issue with enormously widespread implications.

It is hoped that this lack of empirical research does not detract from the benefits that reading this special issue can bring and instead contributes to, and encourages continuing conversation on enhancing decisions so that readers benefit from the insights and thoughts offered by our esteemed authors.

Erwin RauschDidactic Systems Inc., Cranford, New Jersey, USA