Models and Theories of Decision-Making Essay

One of the most prominent aspects of the surrounding post-industrial reality in the West has to do with the fact that, as of today, it often constitutes a matter of crucial importance for organizations to be able to access the cognitive/perceptual predispositions, on the part of employees – especially within the context of how the latter go about making executive decisions.

The reason for this is apparent – is deeply embedded in the organization’s operational matrix, the qualitative subtleties of the concerned process define the measure of the corporate entity’s functional efficiency. In its turn, this explains why, as time goes on, more and more social scientists concern themselves with researching the actual mechanics of how the workings of one’s psyche affect the person’s decision-making choices (Newell & Shanks, 2014).

Hence, the rationale for subjecting the issue to an analytical inquiry – in the aftermath of having researched the subject matter in question, the author expects to be able to gain several in-depth insights into what causes an individual to choose in favor of one or another course of action while striving to tackle a particular professional/personal challenge in the most effective manner.

The outlined objective will be achieved using reviewing the scholarly articles of relevance, concerning the conceptual provisions of the most popular decision-making theories, and interpreting the implications of the would-be obtained discursive acumens. The systemic and cultural aspects of decision-making will be analyzed, as well.

Paradigmatic Models of Decision-Making

As it appears from the thematically relevant academic sources, just about every decision-making theory can be categorized as being either “normative” (rationalistic) or “psychological” (descriptive). The main principle of such a categorization is reflective of the existence of two conceptually incompatible paradigms for theorizing the essence of the decision-making processes inside one’s brain, which go by the same names.

The foremost conceptual premise of the normative paradigm of decision-making is that being rational agents, people are naturally driven to rely on their ability to indulge in dialectical (cause-effect) reasoning when facing a particular cognitive task. According to the model’s adherents, how one reacts to the externally induced stimuli is inheritably logical and it is namely the maximization of utility that represents the actual goal of just about any decision-making activity. The paradigm’s axiomatic presuppositions are as follows:

• An individual is in the possession of all relevant information, throughout the the entirety of the decision-making process – the main precondition for ensuring that the actual choice that he or she makes is rationally sound.
• It is possible to predict with a high degree of certainty what will account for the long-term effects of how a person goes about deciding to addresses a problematic issue.
• A decision-maker is naturally driven to choose the best of all possible decisions – that is, the one that fits the best the applicable criteria of effectiveness. In turn, these criteria are assumed to be rationale-based. The concerned individual is also expected to be thoroughly aware of the actual goal that he or she aspires to achieve in the end.
• There is a logically linear quality to the person’s decision-making priorities (Rao, Liang & Li, 2009).

The normative outlook on the decision-making process is commonly referred to as such that enables its practitioner to choose in favor of the most rationally sound out of the potentially applicable decisions. The model’s yet another strength is assumed to be reflective of the fact that its affiliates are in the position to justify their decisions to themselves and others. Finally, the normative paradigm of decision-making is praised for taking into account the factor of uncertainty, which undermines the process’s effectiveness – especially if decision-makers choose to ignore the factor’s systemic implications.

Nevertheless, the normative approach to conceptualizing the theoretical and practical implications of decision-making is being criticized for the fact that its affiliates do not give much thought to the fact that it proves impossible for most people to remain unaffected by different emotions, within the context of how they go about rationalizing their choices. Another criticism of the rationalistic conceptualization of decision-making is that it does not correlate well with the most recent discoveries in the field of neuroscience. This, of course, implies the overall erroneousness of the normative assumption that just about anyone can exercise completely rational control over the flow of its thoughts.

Once accessed from the psychological (or descriptive) perspective, the decision-making process is best defined as the process of a particular individual choosing between a few available alternatives, as he or she tackles a problematic issue/situation under the condition of uncertainty. As a rule, there is a multitude of possible alternatives and the criteria for selecting one out of them is fundamentally subjective, as it reflects how s decision-maker perceives the surrounding socioeconomic reality and its place in it.

The main postulates of the psychological paradigm of decision-making are as follows:

• There is a never-ending omnipresence of the factor of uncertainty, within the context of how important decisions are being made. Under the model’s auspices, an individual is assumed to be generally aware of this factor, but he or she rarely realizes the full scope of potential implications, in this regard.
• One is in the position to alter its decisions as they are being implemented – something that implies the reversibility of the decision-making process.
• As people face a decision-making choice, they will be naturally tempted to overestimate the likelihood of unlikely events and at the same time underestimate the odds of very plausible events. They will also be likelier to choose in favor of risky choices when trying to prevent the actualization of negative developmental scenarios, as opposed to trying to increase the beneficence of the potentially positive ones.
• People tend to reduce the number of alternatives when making a decision and think of an uncertain task as being much more certain than it is. They are also innately driven to evaluate the appropriateness of a particular decision in conjunction with what accounted for the direct (observable) consequences of its practical implementation.
• One’s decision-making choices cannot be discussed outside of what accounts for the particulars of the concerned individual’s ethnocultural affiliation (Mishra, 2014).

The main strength of the psychological model of decision-making is that it recognizes the process’s phenomenological nature. At the same time, however, it is being criticized for its lack of axiomatic integrity – something that diminishes the paradigm’s value as the practical instrument of predicting the actual consequences of decision-making in organizational settings.

Decision-Making Theories

Rational Choice Theory (RCT)

The origins of this specific theory date back to the mid-20^th century, when the utilization of a positivist research methodology in social research used to be deemed thoroughly appropriate. Among those who have contributed rather substantially towards conceptualizing the theory’s axiomatic provisions can be named John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (Cabantous & Gond, 2011). The main theoretical premise of RCT is as follows: While decision-making, a rational agent strives to maximize utility as this process’s guiding principle.

To legitimize the full soundness of such an approach, he or she is being naturally motivated to evaluate utility in quantitative terms. The theory also stresses the fact that most individuals tend to choose in favor of a type of action that would reduce the affiliated risks – even if this comes at the expense of allowing the expected beneficence to be lessened, as well. Hence, the theory’s actual “formula” – after having compared the available alternatives for tackling a particular problem, decision-makers always choose in favor of the most energetically efficient and yet highest-value-providing ones.

Such a theoretical presupposition does make much logical sense – not the least because the described decision-making template is generally consistent with the intrinsic subtleties of how one’s brain indulges in the problem-solving type of cognition. At the same time, however, it would be inappropriate regarding RCT as such that represents an undisputed truth-value. After all, being essentially normative, RCT pays very little attention to how the factor of one’s perceptual/cognitive subjectivity affects the flow of decision-making thoughts inside his or her brain (Kalantari, 2010).

What undermines the practical value of this theory even further is the sheer complexity of operational dynamics in modern organizations – something that renders the linear conceptualization of one’s decision-making logic (promoted by RCT) quite inapplicable. As practice indicates, today’s decision-makers in organizational settings often choose in favor of the first more or less satisfying executive option, as opposed to being opting in for the most rationally sound one.

Subjective Expected Utility Theory (SEUT)

SEUT was conceptualized by Leonard Savage in his 1954 book The Foundations of Statistics and is generally regarded to be a variation of RCT. In a similar manner with RCT, SEUT presupposes that the effectiveness of the decision-making process positively relates to the measurable factor of utility, concerning the process’s goal. Nevertheless, as opposed to what is the case with RCT, this theory includes the variables of subjectivity and uncertainty into the function for defining the probability of a decision-maker to end up choosing in favor of a particular course of action while striving to resolve an organizational dilemma. The theory’s most distinctive characteristic is that it:

1. recognizes the fundamental subjectivity of the very notion of utility,
2. relies on the Bayesian interpretation of probability, as the factor heavily influenced by psychological predispositions of a decision-maker (Gaifman & Liu, 2017).

The main component of SEUT is the concept of probability. In this regard, an inquiry is made into whether the main source of uncertainty is the decision-maker himself or the world around him. Accordingly, an emphasis is placed on the probability of random events (objective probability) and the quality of one’s conviction in their inevitability (subjective probability). SEUT recognizes the full objectivity of economic variabilities, within the contextual framework of which a person makes an executive decision.

However, the very economic reality presupposes that the recurring situations for which objective probabilities could be calculated are not a rule, but an exception. Seldom or unique situations and events predominate. Hence, the theory’s postulate of “subjective probability”, which serves as a function of objective probability. To preserve the operational integrity of the theory, its adherents assume the innately objective nature of the subjective factors of influence on a decision-maker while anticipating that within the theory’s function, their sum equals 1.

It is assumed that since economic actors are driven by the considerations of casuistic rationale, the subjective probability of an odd event/development, within the context of how they indulge in decision-making, can be objectively identified and assigned a numerical value. Nevertheless, SEUT is commonly criticized for the fact that it derives from the assumption that it is indeed possible for an individual to have a multidimensional understanding of a particular utility – something that very rarely being the actual case.

Prospect Theory (PT)

This decision-making theory is generally regarded as belonging to the “descriptive” category. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are credited for creating it in 1979. PT describes how people choose between those alternatives, in which the probabilities of different outcomes are known. Each possible outcome has a certain probability of occurrence and value, which one defines subjectively. Values ​​can be either positive or negative.

According to the theory, people tend to underestimate the likelihood of the emergence of unforeseen alternatives for solving a particular problem and idealize the factor of perceptual certainty in decision-making. PT also stresses out the heuristic nature of the decision-making process, regarding the anticipated gains/losses, while aiming to model the situations in which individuals face “real life choices” and experience the shortage of time to choose in favor of one or another decision (Mustafa & Kingston, 2014).

The theory’s other axiomatic premise is that one’s decisions can never be 100% optimized – all because the factor of uncertainty causes the decision-making independent and dependent variables to never cease being constantly transformed as time goes on. The theory’s main discursive implication is that how individuals rationalize their choices is reflective to an extent of the specifics of these people’s “brain wiring”, which makes it quite impossible to predict their decision-making behavioral pattern, especially if the concerned individuals are pressed by time. Partially, this explains the rest of the theory’s important presuppositions, such as the following ones:

• People’s perception of the utility’s value is strongly affected by other potentially attainable utilities, to which the former relates or can be compared.
• There is a great variance, regarding how different individuals evaluate potential gains/losses while in process of trying to come with the optimal strategy for addressing a problematic situation.
• One’s sensitivity to losses, incurred as a result of having decided in favor of a particular decision-making option, negatively relates to the measurable amount of the former. In plain words, the more we lose, the less sensitive we become towards the prospect of sustaining even more losses.

Because of it, the theory’s advocates insist that it is not the de facto viability of the adopted decision, which people are driven to asses while choosing between the available decision-making options, but rather the emotional value of the would-be undertaken course of action, on their part.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory (CDT)

The Cognitive Dissonance Theory in the field of psychology of management was first conceptualized by Leon Festinger. It draws from the Freudian idea that humans are innately predisposed to avoid recognizing the existence of any logical contradiction between their socially constructed understanding of the surrounding reality’s essence, on the one hand, and this reality’s observable emanations, on the other. Such a contradiction is termed “cognitive dissonance”. This term refers to a state of emotional discomfort in one’s psyche, provoked by the clash of conflicting ideas in his or her mind.

Among the factors that trigger the sensation of cognitive dissonance in individuals are commonly listed:

• Logical inconsistency.
• The intrinsic dissimilarity between the existential attitudes of a decision-maker and those professed by most people within the society.
• The inability of a decision-maker to relate the present decision-making dilemma to the similar (formally) ones that he or she has dealt with in the past (McKimmie, 2015).

The sensation of cognitive dissonance arises from one’s awareness of the fact that his/her actions are not firmly grounded, most commonly in the ethical sense of this word. This usually happens when he/she acts contrary to its own attitudes/beliefs and when this type of behavior is unacceptable to other individuals. Hence, the theory’s main postulate – when it comes to choosing between a few available options for addressing a particular situation, an individual will be likely to prefer the one that would cause him/her to experience the least of emotional angst, in the aftermath of having decided to deal with this situation in one way or another.

Even though many of this theory’s insights into the process of decision-making are indeed enlightening, the overall soundness of CDT is assumed to be undermined by the axiomatic vagueness of many of its theoretical presuppositions.

Poliheuristic Theory (PT)

This specific theory can be described in terms of an innovative attempt to combine the rationalistic and descriptive approaches to ensuring the effectiveness of the decision-making process in organizational settings. In essence, PT derives from the empirical observation that while facing a particular decision-making dilemma, people will naturally seek the most energetically sound ways to addressing the issue – something that presupposes the hypothetical availability of various “heuristic shortcuts” to doing it.

According to the theory’s proponents, there are two phases to just about any decision-making process: the evaluation of available options and the adoption of the most circumstantially appropriate one. For individuals in charge of making executive decisions to be able to prove themselves professionally adequate, concerning addressing this specific responsibility of theirs, they must be quick-minded enough to grasp the potential effects of affective situational constraints/opportunities on the process in question. Hence, the theory’s emphasis on the factor of “mental flexibility”, as this process’s integral component (Keller & Yang, 2008).

Within the theory’s conceptual framework, it is assumed that decision-makers must not only be capable of adequately reacting to the spontaneously emerging circumstances of discursive relevance but also of predicting the full spectrum of the would-be adopted decision’s long-term effects. In its turn, this presupposes the legitimacy of combining the elements of logos and pathos, within the context of how people handle different organizational choices.

Information Processing Theory (IPT)

According to the practitioners of IPT, the decision-making process inside one’s brain cannot be properly assessed outside of what contemporary neuroscientists/psychologists know about the technical aspects of how informational inputs affect the induced decision-making responses in an individual. The main assumption here is that the nature of these responses must be algorithmic to an extent, in the behaviorist sense of this word, which implies that it is indeed possible to teach a person to make circumstantially sound decisions (Mustafa & Kingston, 2014). The theory’s main drawback, however, is that those who aspire to take practical advantage of it must be knowledgeable of how the human brain functions.

Decision-Making in Organizational Settings

As of today, there are several varying definitions as to what the notion of decision-making stands for. Nevertheless, given the descriptive nature of this research, decision-making can be generally defined as a managerial activity, concerned with finding the most appropriate approach for handling a particular organizational issue/problem. In its turn, this suggests that the decision itself is best seen as an externally induced impetus for the current state of affairs with a particular organizational issue to become solvable/manageable.

The main criterion for the decision-making process to be able to bring about the anticipated outcome is that those in charge of making executive decisions are thoroughly aware of as many qualitative subtleties of the process’s subject as possible. Such awareness must also have a strongly defined spatial quality to it. That is, decision-makers need to possess an in-depth understanding of the effects of time-passage on the issue that needs to be addressed (Fox, Tost & Wade-Benzoni, 2010).

As a rule, there is much systemic complexity to just about every decision-making process, even in cases that presuppose the appropriateness of choosing in favor of the specifically intuitive decisions. Nevertheless, it is still possible to ascertain the process’s universal components, such as the identification of the problem, the actual objective of the would-be applied intervention, and the scope of available options for solving this problem.

Another common attribute of the process is the availability of a step-by-step plan for reaching the intervention’s objective. In its turn, this plan is best conceptualized in terms of an algorithm for the allocation of the would-be required problem-solving resources.

Decision-making activities permeate human life throughout its entirety. Most decisions we make are spontaneously intuitive – the suggestion fully consistent with the fact that even the most rational workings of one’s conscious psyche are fundamentally unconscious. However, it is also very common for a person to experience much difficulty while trying to pick the most justified option from the available ones for dealing with a particular situation – especially if the decision-making process takes place within organizational/corporate settings. As practice indicates, three circumstantial preconditions usually predetermine such an eventual development – the sheer novelty of the subject of choice, the unfamiliar surrounding environment, and the lack of information (Lincoln & Holmes, 2010).

As a part of the managerial process, however, decision-making is much more systematic of an activity, which implies that it is indeed possible to exercise full control over its sub-sequential phases. The basic elements of the decision-making process in organizations include:

• Ensuring that the deployed line of reasoning, concerning what would account for the most appropriate executive decision, is casuistically sound. That is, it correlates well with the cause-effect principle of the economy’s functioning.
• Choosing in favor of a systemic approach for addressing the situation of a managerial concern, which in turn presupposes that for as long as this process takes place within organizational settings, the appropriated decision-making rationale can hardly be linear.
• Establishing the objective preconditions for the would-be adopted decision to be consistent with the overall logic of the affiliated organization’s development. In its most basic form, the methodological framework for organizational decision-making can be outlined as follows:
  • Identification of the whole scope of potentially applicable problem-solving approaches.
  • Formulation of the quantitatively measurable objective for a decision-maker be aspiring to achieve.
  • Conceptualization of the actual method for assessing the viability of each of available options and testing their practical workability.
  • Simulation of the chosen decision’s practical implementation (George & Dane, 2016).

What has been mentioned earlier implies that, as it is being revealed in the reviewed articles, the paradigm of organizational decision-making continues to remain quintessentially positivist. The rationale behind this suggestion has to do with the fact that most of these articles recognize the full objectivity of the organization’s functioning as a “thing-in-itself”, which in turn presupposes that the making of important decisions by managers is reflective of the values of the “corporate culture” professed by these individuals.

Subsequently, these values cannot be anything else but thoroughly consistent with namely the Eurocentric/object-oriented (as opposed to context-oriented) outlook on the discursive significance of both horizontally and vertically structured organizations, as being primarily the instruments of generating a monetary profit. The obtained insights also imply that, as of today, the effectiveness of one’s managerial decision-making is measured on a short-term scale – the observation that correlates well with the neoliberal model of economy.

Fundamental Impediments to Effective Decision-Making

As it can be inferred from what has been said earlier, there is no shortage of different theories of decision-making. Probably the main notable feature of all of them is that the methodological apparatus of each of the reviewed theories is interdisciplinary to an extent. That is, the proposed criteria for accessing the effectiveness of decision-making have several strongly interconnected psychological, sociological, and economic qualities.

The foremost reason for this has to do with the fact that:

1. Just about every theory of decision-making is reflective of the idea that people naturally seek to eliminate the factor of risk while choosing among the available options to address a problematic issue,
2. The factor of risk in decision-making cannot be eliminated by definition.

The validity of the latter suggestion can be illustrated, concerning the Uncertainty Principle, formulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. According to this principle, it is impossible to have information about both the elementary particle’s speed and its coordinates at the same time, which implies that uncertainty is embedded in the very operational matrix of the universe (Marciak-Kozlowska & Kozlowski, 2013). Because the surrounding physical reality is made of atoms, the qualitative essence of this reality’s transformative fluctuations cannot be predicted with a high degree of probability, even when the functioning of different macro-systems (such as the human society) is being concerned.

Hence, the so-called “butterfly effect”, which defines the systemic significance of the decision-making process – the micro-alteration of the situation’s initial conditions will have a macro-effect on how this situation will develop in the future. What this means is that, no matter how hard a person strives to lessen the factor of uncertainty while decision-making, the appropriateness/inappropriateness of the would-be chosen decision will remain a largely incidental category.

There is even more to it – by trying to take into account all the potential risks, a decision-maker is aiming to ensure the holistic soundness (“completeness”) of the chosen decision, which results in undermining the practical applicability of the former, whatever paradoxical this may be. After all, the more all-accountable a particular problem-solving approach is, the more likely for it to be self-contradictory – all in full accordance with the Theorem of Incompleteness by Kurt Godel (Kalimuthu, 2016). The validity of this suggestion is partially reflective of the fact that, as military commanders are well aware of, even the most thought-out military plans tend to turn unviable as soon as they begin to be practically implemented.

The mentioned considerations raise a certain doubt about whether the normative paradigm of decision-making should be regarded as thoroughly applicable. The very laws of historical progress presuppose that, as time goes on, people’s understanding of the fundamental principles of the decision-making process is bound to undergo a discursive transformation.

Decision-Making and Culture

As the conducted literature review reveals, there is another factor that contributes towards complicating the decision-making process even further – that of one’s ethnocultural affiliation. After all, there indeed appears to be a good rationale for assuming that a person’s racial/cultural background does exert a strong influence on the very essence of cognitive processes in his or her neocortex, which in turn is being extrapolated by the observable particulars of this individual’s decision-making style.

For example, according to Güss and Robinson (2014), people of Anglo-Saxon descend exhibit a strong propensity for indulging in the specifically adaptor-type of decision-making. That is, they tend to take much time before coming to conclude that the chosen course of action, on their part, requires some adjustments.

The authors’ observation, in this regard, is best explained in conjunction with what psychologists know about the qualitative characteristics of one’s endowment with “Faustian” (Western) mentality. The Chinese, on the other hand, clearly prefer the oscillator-type of decision-making – something reflective of these people’s tendency to react to the external stimuli as the latter is being induced by the surrounding social/natural environment. Consequentially, this implies that the formulation of the most circumstantially adequate approach to resolving a particularly problematic issue must be culturally sound.

This simply could not be otherwise, as there are many good reasons to believe that the appropriateness of executive decisions is a relativist category – whatever may appear as a thoroughly justified decision to some people, will be deemed rather unworkable by others (Podrug, 2011). Therefore, it will be logical to assume that there can be no intrinsically “right” or “wrong” methodologies for decision-making, but only the effective and ineffective ones. Moreover, in light of what has been mentioned earlier, there can be very little doubt that the factor of perceptual subjectivity will continue to have a strong effect on how people choose in favor of one out of many applicable decision-making options.

Conclusion

Just as it was anticipated initially, the conducted literature review did yield several enlightening insights into the subject matter in question. The most important of them can be summarized as follows:

• Out of the outlined theories of decision-making, it is namely the psychological/descriptive ones that appear to be the most legitimate – not the least because these theories correlate well with the recent discoveries in the field of psychology and neurobiology.
• The factor of uncertainty will continue to remain an integral element of the decision-making process, regardless of the actual settings. What this means is that there can be no 100% workable formula for ensuring the appropriateness of the would-be adopted decisions.
• The decision-making process should not be discussed outside of what accounts for the culturally predetermined tendency of a decision-maker to exhibit a particular behavioral pattern while responding to environmental challenges. This undermines to an extent the validity of the activity’s object-oriented/normative paradigm, which many authors continue to consider universally applicable.
• The reviewed theories of decision-making do not appear to represent any objective value of their own, independent of the currently dominant socioeconomic discourse in the West. This, in turn, implies that it is indeed possible for an individual to prove himself/herself an extremely competent decision-maker, without being well versed in the theory of decision-making and vice versa.

Overall, it can be confirmed that during the last few decades our understanding of how people go about making choices has progressed rather substantially – the sheer availability of scholarly articles concerned with this specific matter serves as the best proof, in this regard. Because of what has been mentioned earlier, it will only be logical to expect the continual “interdisciplinization” of decision-making research into the future. The author believes that this paper will prove contributive, in this regard, as well.

References

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