Individual Decision Making Analysis

Human beings have to made decisions right from childhood stage but the complexity of the decisions to be made or the circumstances preceding a decision vary from simple personal decisions to being in a group making corporate decisions. Individual Decision Making involves arriving at the decision at a personal level without involving external persons or making the decision regardless of an external or group's view point. This is the common method of making decisions and it has been observed to be effective when input from external parties is not necessary or in circumstances when a person might find themselves in need of immediate decision in order to tackle a particular situation. For example a person who is driving a car needs to make decisions about what action to take as he drives along the road with regards to following the driving laws and how to respond to actions by other road users. In this situation, an individual utilizes the intuitive decision making process (Cottrell, 2009) which is based on the experience that he has gone through.
According to Buchanan and Huczynski (2013), an individual’s quality of decisions can be influenced by how they perceive the surrounding circumstances in a given situation. This process falls in the “rational decision-making model” whereby an individual rationalizes and makes a decision based on the rational circumstances. For example a manager might be required to make a decision on whether to punish or pardon an employee who has made an error but his decision is based on the circumstances surrounding the event. If two managers were to independently evaluate the situation, one person might decide to punish while another might decide to pardon because it will depend on the personal interpre...

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...decisions than can be arrived at and their consequences. An example of how this decision making process can be used is when a jury is unable to make a common decision mostly due to group polarization, one of the jurors can play the devil’s advocate by presenting an argument from the ‘other’ perspective opposite to what he rest of the group are focusing on in order to help them to make a decision.
According to Berniker and McNabb (2006) the dialectical inquiry method can also be used by a group to help them make a decision. In this methodology, two alternatives are presented to the group for evaluation and they are discussed and then the group evaluates the two options and chooses whether to pick one of the options or to combine the two and use that as the final solution to the debate. This decision making process closely mirrors the devil’s advocacy method.