Q&A Hero

Q: The availability heuristic refers to the tendency: A. to choose an alternative that is good enough rather than the best. B. for people to influence an initial anchor point. C. to evaluate probabilities of events or objects by how closely it resembles another event. D. to estimate the probability of something occurring by how easily we can recall those events. E. for decision makers to evaluate alternatives sequentially rather than comparing them all at once.

Q: Decision makers tend to rely on their implicit favorite when they: A. select an appropriate decision style. B. evaluate decision alternatives sequentially. C. want to avoid escalation of commitment. D. want to make more creative decisions. E. have to make a selection from very limited alternatives.

Q: Which of the following is an observation from organizational behavior that contradicts the rational choice paradigm assumptions?A. Decision makers evaluate all alternatives simultaneously.B. Decision makers use factual information to choose alternatives.C. Decision makers choose the alternative with the highest payoff.D. Decision makers have limited information processing abilities.E. Decision makers use absolute standards to evaluate alternatives.

Q: Which of the following is one of the assumptions of the rational choice paradigm? A. Decision makers evaluate alternatives against an implicit favorite. B. Decision makers choose the alternative that is good enough. C. Decision makers have well-articulated goals. D. Decision makers evaluate alternatives sequentially. E. Decision makers process perceptually distorted information.

Q: The concept of bounded rationality holds that: A. our perception of a rational reality is bounded by nonrationality. B. decision makers process limited and imperfect information and therefore rarely select the best choice. C. decision makers have limited alternatives to make decisions. D. decision makers are bound to project images of themselves as rational thinkers. E. our realities are bounded by our own perceptions so that everyone's reality is different.

Q: What effect do mental models have on the decision-making process? A. They perpetuate assumptions that make it difficult to see new opportunities. B. They allow decision makers to obtain accurate information from the surroundings. C. They reduce the importance of developing alternative solutions to the problem. D. They allow decision makers to maximize the potential of their decision making. E. They help people to be more creative in decision making.

Q: Perceptual defense causes us to: A. defend the solutions we propose. B. defend those who agree with us when we identify a problem. C. defend the perception we have after making a decision. D. block out bad news or information that threatens our self-concept. E. justify our actions to defend our position.

Q: The tendency to define problems in terms of a preferred solution occurs because: A. it provides a comforting solution. B. decision makers prefer ambiguity rather than decisiveness. C. it avoids the escalation of commitment problem. D. it avoids problems of bounded rationality. E. it helps in minimizing the biases caused by mental models.

Q: During a meeting, senior executives of a consumer products company were addressing the problem of being late in detecting several consumer trends, such as the trend toward using see-through plastics in kitchenware. While trying to determine the source of this problem, one executive said: "The main problem here is that we need to find a better industrial design firm to design our products." Which of the following best describes the decision-making problem that this executive is exhibiting? A. The executive is engaging in escalation of commitment. B. The executive is being too creative. C. The executive is involved in participative decision making. D. The executive is engaging in groupthink. E. The executive is defining the problem in terms of a solution.

Q: One school of management thought states that organizational decisions and actions are influenced mainly by what attracts management's attention, rather than by the objective reality of the external or internal environment. Which of the following practices is closely associated with this argument? A. Rational choice paradigm B. Programmed decision making C. Perceptual defense D. Decisive leadership E. Stakeholder framing

Q: The purely rational model of decision making is rarely practiced in reality because it: A. ignores the fact that problems must be defined before alternatives are chosen. B. assumes that human beings make decisions based on their emotions and abilities. C. assumes that people are perfectly rational in their decision making. D. ignores the fact that people evaluate their decision after an alternative has been chosen and implemented. E. does not consider the problems associated with implementing each of the alternatives.

Q: Which of these is the final step in the rational choice decision making process? A. Developing a list of solutions B. Implementing the selected alternative C. Choosing the best alternative D. Evaluating decision outcomes E. Recognizing the opportunities

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

Q: The rational decision making model begins with: A. evaluating alternatives. B. identifying an opportunity. C. searching for alternatives. D. implementing the solution. E. searching for information about outcomes to each alternative.

Q: The rational choice paradigm selects the choice with the highest utility through the calculation of: A. subjective expected utility. B. selective expected utility. C. solution-focused utility. D. rational expected utility. E. rational selective utility.

Q: The view that people should and typically do use logic and all available information to choose the alternative with the highest value is known as: A. subjective expected utility maximization. B. the rational choice paradigm. C. bounded rationality. D. decision making. E. intuition.

Q: _____ is a conscious process of making choices among one or more alternatives with the intention of moving toward some desired state of affairs. A. Decision making B. Bounded rationality C. Divergent thinking D. Prospect theory E. Scenario planning

Q: High employee involvement would be difficult to achieve when conflict is likely among employees.

Q: The four outcomes of employee involvement are decision structure, source of decision knowledge, decision commitment, and risk of conflict.

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

Q: Employee involvement tends to weaken the decision-making process.

Q: Employee involvement potentially improves both the decision-making quality and the commitment of employees.

Q: A low level of employee involvement occurs when employees are individual asked for specific information but the problem is not described to them.

Q: In organizational settings, creativity usually occurs alone rather than with other people.

Q: Cross-pollination is recommended to encourage creativity in organizations.

Q: 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.

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

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

Q: People are most creative when management puts intense time pressures on them to complete tasks.

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

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

Q: Creative people are more embarrassed when they make mistakes.

Q: Creative people tend to have a high need for affiliation.

Q: Knowledge and experience can undermine creativity because they can lead to routinization of that knowledge.

Q: Creative people need have practical intelligence but not cognitive intelligence.

Q: The ideas that form during the illumination stage of creativity need to be verified through logical evaluation and experimentation.

Q: The ideas that appear during the illumination stage of creativity are quickly forgotten unless documented.

Q: Divergent thinking refers to calculating the conventionally accepted "right answer" to a logical problem.

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

Q: 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.

Q: Creativity is defined as reframing a problem in a unique way and generating different approaches to the issue.

Q: Involving several people in the evaluation of a decision weakens the decision evaluation process.

Q: Escalation of commitment is likely to occur when the perceived costs of terminating the project are high or unknown.

Q: The prospect theory effect motivates us to avoid losses.

Q: The four main influences of escalation of commitment are self-justification effect, self-enhancement effect, prospect theory effect, and sunk costs effect.

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

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

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

Q: Scenario planning is a systematic process of thinking about alternative futures and what the organization should do to anticipate and react to those environments.

Q: Intuition operates independently of the programmed decision routines that speed up our response to pattern matches or mismatches.

Q: Intuition is based on mental templates or models representing tacit knowledge about a situation.

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

Q: When making important decisions, we "listen in" on our emotions to guide our preference among the decision alternatives.

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

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

Q: Research suggests that decision makers do not evaluate several alternatives when they find an opportunity.

Q: One of the reasons people use satisficing rather than maximization when making decisions is that they lack the capacity and motivation to process the huge volume of information required to identify the best choice.

Q: The clustering illusion is the tendency to see patterns from a small sample of events when those events are, in fact, random.

Q: The representativeness heuristic is a natural tendency to assign higher probabilities to objects or events that are easier to recall from memory.

Q: Although the implicit favorite comparison process seems to be hardwired in human decision making, it often undermines effective decision making.

Q: Decision makers typically look at alternatives sequentially and compare each alternative with an implicit favorite.

Q: The rational choice paradigm assumes that decision makers have limited information-processing capabilities and engage in a limited search for alternatives.

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

Q: Preconceived mental models formed by our cognitive structure help us make better and accurate decisions.

Q: Decision makers have a need to reduce uncertainty, so they tend to engage in solution-focused problem identification.

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

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

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

Q: The rational choice decision paradigm recommends choosing the alternative with a moderate subjective expected utility.

Q: The rational choice paradigm assumes that obtaining all possible information about all possible alternatives and their outcomes when selecting the choice with the highest SEU is a complex and time-consuming procedure.

Q: Nonprogrammed decisions require all steps in the decision model because the problems they present are new, complex, or ill-defined.

Q: The first step in the rational choice paradigm is to identify the problem or recognize an opportunity.

Q: The rational choice paradigm has dominated decision making philosophy in Western societies for most of written history.

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

Q: Decision making is a nonconscious process of moving toward a desirable state of affairs.

Q: Positive self-talk motivates employees by increasing their effort-to-performance expectancy.

Q: Self-leadership suggests that goals should be set by the employee's supervisor with or without the employee's involvement.

Q: Self-leadership borrows ideas from social learning theory and research in sports psychology on constructive thought processes.

Q: Empowerment tends to decrease personal initiative among employees.

Q: Empowerment flourishes in organizations with a learning orientation.