Decision Making
We all have to make decisions constantly. These go from the elemental decision a child makes when he withdraws his hand from a bathtub full of hot water to extremely important decisions made when negotiating agreements between enterprises.
Administration is the exercise and art of making decisions in organizations. As a consequence, making decisions is the most important act in management practice.
A decision is a final resolution or determination.
Decision making has also been defined as the selection of a course of action between two or more alternatives.
The term decision derives from decidere, which means "to cut". This is to say, the administrator, once he has made a decision, requires strength in his purpose. Moreover, we must remember that decision in administrative level are the base of planning and the rest of the phases of the administrative process.
In administration, managers and even employees, take more options over decisions, because a decision can't be modified. In other words, it means abandoning the past.
Structured and Non-Structured Decisions.
Structured decisions are made according to policies, procedures or rules, written or not written, that allow decision making in recurring situations because they limit or discard alternatives. For example, administrators rarely have to worry about the salary range of a new employee, since by a general rule, enterprises already have a salary scale for every position. There are routine procedures to deal with routine situations.
Structured decisions are used to address recurring problems, may them be simple or complex. In a certain measure, structured decisions restrict freedom, since the worker has less field of action to decide what to do. Nevertheless, the objective of structured decisions is to liberate.
Non-Structured decisions address less frequent or exceptional problems. If a situation hasn't been present enough for a policy to cover it or if becomes too important that deserves special attention, it will be handled as a non-structured decision. Problems such as distributing the resources of an enterprise, what to do with a line of products that weren't as successful as we hoped it to be, what to do to improve the relationship to society, etc., constitute situations where the manager makes transcendent decisions of the non-structured type.
Every time you ascend in the hierarchic level of the enterprise, the capability of making non-structured decisions becomes more relevant. This is why the majority of development programs of administrators, specially managers, attempts to improve their abilities for non-structured decision making, as a general rule, teaching them to analyze problems in a systematical manner and making logical decisions.
