Deck 7: Decision Making and Creativity

Question 1

Bounded rationality adopts the main assumptions of the rational choice paradigm of decision making.

Answer 1

False

Question 2

The rational choice paradigm assumes that decision makers have well-articulated and agreed-on organizational goals.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

According to bounded rationality theory,people make better decisions when their perceptions are "bounded" or framed by past experience.

Answer 3

False

Question 4

The decision maker's emotions play an important role in his or her identification of a problem or opportunity.

Question 5

Subjective expected utility refers to how much the selected alternative benefits or satisfies the decision maker.

Question 6

Our mental models of the world can prevent us from recognizing emerging problems in the workplace.

Question 7

If a decision maker encounters the same problem several times,he or she can increasingly rely on nonprogrammed decision routines to solve the problem.

Question 8

Decision makers typically look at alternatives sequentially and compare each alternative to an implicit favourite.

Question 9

The rational choice paradigm assumes that people rely on logic to evaluate and choose alternatives.

Question 10

Ill-defined problems require a nonprogrammed decision process.

Question 11

Decision makers can discover blind spots in problem identification by discussing the situation with other people.

Question 12

The rational choice paradigm states that effective decision makers begin at any step in the model.

Question 13

The last step in the rational decision-making model is to evaluate the decision outcomes.

Question 14

Clustering illusion causes us to see patterns from a small sample of events,when in fact those events are random.

Question 15

Decision makers have a need to reduce uncertainty,so they tend to focus on solutions before fully understanding the problem.

Question 16

The decision-making process is more effective when problems are defined in terms of their solutions.

Question 17

The textbook argues that problem identification is usually the least important step in the rational choice paradigm.

Question 18

Decision making is an unconscious process of moving toward a desirable state of affairs.

Question 19

One reason why the problem identification stage is imperfect is that various stakeholders try to "frame" the decision maker's view of the situation.

Question 20

Satisficing occurs when people continue on a failing course of action.

Question 21

Intuition includes any emotional signals we experience regarding a situation.

Question 22

The emerging emotional view of decision making states that people form preferences toward alternatives as soon as they receive information about those alternatives.

Question 23

Intuition is based on well-grounded mental models.

Question 24

Prospect theory and self-justification are the main causes of satisficing.

Question 25

One strategy to improve the decision evaluation process is to involve as few people as possible to reduce potential ambiguity and conflict.

Question 26

When making important decisions,emotional markers guide our preference among the decision alternatives.

Question 27

Scenario planning is a structured process that helps decision makers explore potential problems and choose the best solutions under different future conditions.

Question 28

Escalation of commitment may be corrected by ensuring that those involved in choosing decision alternatives are also responsible for evaluating the implemented solution.

Question 29

Escalation of commitment occurs when employees increase their support for a decision because most of their colleagues also support that decision.

Question 30

Whether or not the emotions we experience in a situation represent intuition depends largely on our level of experience in that situation.

Question 31

According to almost all organizational behaviour research,intuitive decision making causes us to make wrong decisions.

Question 32

Intuition allows us to draw on our tacit knowledge to guide our decision preferences.

Question 33

Creativity occurs only in a few types of decisions.

Question 34

When in a positive mood,people pay more attention to details and follow a nonprogrammed decision routine.

Question 35

Intuition is the main strategy to minimize escalation of commitment.

Question 36

Post-decisional justification causes decision makers to forget what decision they made.

Question 37

Representativeness heuristics is a natural tendency to pay less attention to whether something resembles something else than on more precise statistics about its probability.

Question 38

Post-decisional justification gives people an excessively optimistic evaluation of their decisions,until they receive very clear and undeniable information to the contrary.

Question 39

Systematic evaluation of alternatives helps to increase the use of implicit favourites and satisficing in the decision process.

Question 40

Decision makers tend not to evaluate various alternatives when they find an opportunity.

Question 41

Creative people value self-direction,but also have a strong need to follow rules.

Question 42

Employees tend to be less creative in organizations that punish failure.

Question 43

Typically,creative people possess less knowledge and experience on the subject than experts in the field.

Question 44

Creativity should be used only in cases of nonprogrammed problems.

Question 45

Creativity tends to suffer during times of downsizing and corporate restructuring.

Question 46

Art classes and improvisational theatre are two creative activities of associative play.

Question 47

Creativity occurs by redefining the problem,not just by finding a unique solution to the existing problem.

Question 48

Divergent thinking occurs when the individual has a fleeting inspiration that is usually forgotten before it can be written down.

Question 49

The incubation stage of creativity is more effective when the decision maker sets aside all other activities and focuses attention on the issue or problem.

Question 50

The ideas that form during the insight stage of creativity need to be verified through conscious evaluation and experimentation.

Question 51

The ideas that appear during the insight stage of creativity are quickly forgotten unless documented.

Question 52

Creative people have a high degree of nonconformity and have less concern about social approval.

Question 53

Incubation is the stage of creativity in which the problem is simmering at the back of your mind while you are doing something else.

Question 54

Creative ideas can emerge when asking people unfamiliar with the problem to explore the problem with you.

Question 55

People are most creative when management puts intense pressure on them to produce creative ideas.

Question 56

Creativity is related to both the characteristics of creative people and the situation in which they work.

Question 57

People are creative because they work in creative environments,not because of any differences in their ability or personality.

Question 58

Knowledge and experience can undermine creativity,because it can lead to routinization of that knowledge.

Question 59

Task significance and autonomy are important conditions for creativity in organizations.

Question 60

Creative people tend to have a high need for social approval.

Question 61

Two contingencies of employee involvement are decision commitment and risk of conflict.

Question 62

____________ utility is the probability (expectancy)of satisfaction (utility)for each alternative.

A)Evaluative alternative
B)Subjective expected
C)Anticipated
D)Rational expected
E)None of the answers apply.

Question 63

The higher the level of employee involvement,the more influence people have over the decision process.

Question 64

For the past 2,500 years,scholars in most western countries have mainly followed the ____________ model of decision making.

A)implicit favourite
B)bounded rationality
C)rational choice
D)prospect theory
E)programmed decision

Question 65

When should decision makers bypass the search for alternative solutions and development of new solutions?

A)Never;bypassing these stages results in poorer decisions.
B)When the decision has ethical implications.
C)In most nonprogrammed decision situations.
D)In most programmed decision-making situations.
E)Only under conditions of bounded rationality.

Question 66

Morphological analysis is a test to identify people with a creative personality.

Question 67

To make the best decisions,the number of employees involved should be minimized.

Question 68

The optimum level of employee involvement depends on the situation.

Question 69

At what stage of the rational choice decision making model would we consider whether the decision is programmed or nonprogrammed?

A)Identifying the problem or opportunity.
B)Choosing the most appropriate decision process.
C)Developing alternative solutions.
D)Choosing the best alternative.
E)Evaluating decision outcomes.

Question 70

The highest level of employee involvement should occur when the problem is structured (i.e.it is a programmed decision).

Question 71

A nonprogrammed decision is:

A)any routine situation where the company has a ready-made solution.
B)any decision that does not relate directly to the employee's job description.
C)any nonroutine situation in which employees much search for alternative solutions.
D)any decision that is clearly within the employee's job description.
E)any decision that affects the employee's performancE.

Question 72

Employees should not make the final decision alone when conflict is likely among employees.

Question 73

Employee involvement tends to weaken synergy in the decision-making process.

Question 74

A potentially useful creative practice is to list different dimensions of a system and the elements of each dimension,then think through the potential commercial usefulness of each combination.

Question 75

The rational choice model of decision making begins with:

A)evaluating alternatives.
B)recognizing and defining the problem.
C)searching for alternatives.
D)implementing the solution.
E)searching for information about outcomes to each alternativE.

Question 76

The highest level of employee involvement occurs when employees are asked to make recommendations to managers,who then decide whether to implement them.

Question 77

Employee involvement potentially improves decision-making quality and commitment.

Question 78

Employee involvement mainly refers to controlling resources for one's own job.

Question 79

Employees are more likely to be committed to implementing a solution when they are involved in making the decision.

Question 80

Employee involvement improves the number and quality of solutions.