Management Assignment: Decision Style Analysis Reflective Report

Question

Task: Context O fManagement Assignment: Fast changing workplaces call for greater flexibility in the ways individuals and work teams make and implement decisions. Alongside the increasing rate of change are the demands for better decision making through understanding and mitigating personal preferences and biases.

It is designed for you to engage in the decision-making process and then reflectively analyse your decision-making process using only theories and concepts from the Business Decision Analytics course (MGT602). You should include in your reflective report:

• The decision-making problem detailed by your learning facilitator
• Analysis of your decision-making preferences
• Analysis and influence of your personality traits and the impact on your decision-making
• Details of the sources of data collected during the decision-making process and how this data was evaluated/analysed
• Analysis of the decision-making process using any model
• Analysis of written feedback from at least 2 other people on your decision-making process in the topic nominated by your Learning

Facilitator

• Visual interpretation of data / trends/ patterns
• As a reflective analysis you will present your analysis in the first person.

Answer

Introduction
The current business environment has become very volatile. According to the research on management assignment, it is stated that external environmental factors that have an impact on business activities are changing continuously which is further throwing major challenges to the organizational leaders. Thus, effective decision making and problem solving has become the core responsibilities of managers across the world. It can help the corporate leaders to help the firm overcome from challenges like economic downturn, political conflicts and other issues. Decision making has the ability to create a relationship between knowledge management and performance of an organization (Abubakar, et.al., 2019). The aim of this report is to reflect upon my decision-making ability. Moreover, my decision-making ability is compared with decision making model in this reflective report.

Analysis/Evaluation
Managers are meant to make effective decisions but they often face decision-making problems. These problems consist of issues and each issue has a close association with numerous alternatives (Conitzer, Freeman & Shah, 2017). Furthermore, managers often make decisions on the basis of organisational information. In the recent times, it can be found that large number of information or data are available with the managers. Thus, managers are often finding it difficult to decipher required information because this information are often ambiguous and conflicting in nature. This is creating decision making issues among managers across the world. Moreover, managers in an organisation are expected to make quick decisions with the data available. Interpreting complicated and conflicting data and making quick decisions out of this is a well-structured decision-making model that needs to be eradicated by firms to enhance their business performance.

When an individual has the ability to make informed decisions that can further help him/her in long-term growth it is termed as an effective decision-making preference. In recent times large scale decision making has become very problematic because too much data is available (Gou, Xu & Herrera, 2018). In my opinion, decision can be properly undertaken if an individual maintains a record of decision-making events that the person is encountering daily. So, I have started writing day-to-day decisions that I have undertaken and jotted down all this information in a diary. In the past, I have taken one major decision to develop my career. I took decisions to learn critical thinking abilities. Due to the global pandemic I am unable to go out and attend seminars and workshops. Therefore, I decided to learn the process and techniques in which I can increase my ability to think critically because in the modern-day business environment critical thinking is important as it helps firm to sustain and strive in the global market.

I have undertaken Big Five personality test. The result of the personality test has been attached in the Appendix below. This test is done on the basis of a model named as OCEAN. The objective of this model is to explain the differences of each person in respect to their feelings, actions and thoughts (Durupinar, et.al., 2016). According to the personality test, I have scored 71% in openness. This means I am moderately curious and creative. This personality of mine can help me to assess information creatively that can further have a positive impact on my decision-making skills. I have scored 77% in conscientiousness. This means I am self-disciplined and have the ability to organize things properly. An individual should organize information properly before making any particular decisions. Thus, high score in this criterion will also help me to make decisions effectively.

However, in Extroversion I have scored only 50%. This personality trait helps in depicting the perception of an individual towards the world (Kaplan, Sanders & Hancock, 2019). This means I am less talkative and have less ability to socialize with people. This personality of mine can have a negative impact on decision making because managers in today’s business environment tend to make business decisions by socializing and communicating with other senior managers and board members of the organisation. Furthermore, I have scored 77% in agreeableness. This means I am sympathetic and forgiving in nature. This might have a negative impact while I make business decisions because the business environment is not forgiving and one must be empathetic but not show sympathy to anyone. Finally, I scored 62.5% in neuroticism. This means I am moderately anxious and have often have negative thoughts and emotions. This is can also act as disadvantage for me while I take business decisions. When an individual makes business decisions, they should be confident and must be optimistic. I might not be able to gather confidence if I fail to remove negative emotions from my mind.

With the help of Big Five Personality Traits assessment, I have been able to identify and analyse my own decision-making approaches and styles. I have scored quite high in the three traits of openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness. It has been observed that three traits of honesty or humility, openness and conscientiousness, are often linked to rational decision-making style (Weller, et al., 2018). In my opinion, this trait enables me to enhance the quality of decision-making by including rationality into the process. It helps me to carefully evaluate various options, focussing on set-goals, discarding irrelevant information and integrating different sources of information. Thus, I think conscientiousness increases my ability to rationally respond to decisions. Besides, by trait of openness to experience also portrays the ability of undertaking rational decisions (Weller, et al., 2018). This is because with this trait I am able to identify and consider new knowledge before making any choices by undertaking a broader perspective. However, there has been contrasting results with my high score in agreeableness trait and rational decision-making style. This is because individuals with high agreeableness tend to depend on others and get influenced by their opinions while undertaking a decision (El Othman, et al., 2020). Thus, it leads to a dependent decision-making style. This indicates that my personality trait of agreeableness is contradicting with the rational decision-making model. Besides, conscientiousness also involves some amount of considering others’ opinions for evaluating various options to analyse the pros and cons of a situation. This further demonstrates the presence of a more intuitive decision-making style. Moreover, openness to experience has been present in me as evident from the assessment result (El Othman, et al., 2020). This shows that I possess a high tolerance for ambiguity and the ability of picturing a problem for finding out its potential solution. It represents an intuitive decision-making style in my personality as I tend to often seek for new opportunities and experiences while undertaking any action. Thus, it can be said that different personality traits of openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness in my character corresponds to both rational, dependent and intuitive decision-making styles.

Furthermore, neuroticism is present in lesser percentage while extraversion is the least identified trait from the assessment as compared to other traits of openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Less neuroticism enables me to display confidence and composed behaviour that is essential for undertaking rational decisions. However, the percentage of neuroticism is not significantly less, which indicates that I might often become insecure and anxious in stressful situations. This would naturally shift my intention towards depending on others for undertaking any decision (Erjavec, et al., 2019). Thus, I would be on the verge of demonstrating a dependent-decision making style. Despite this, the presence of other traits in my personality is beneficial in preventing from facing any interpersonal hostility. While I might face certain anxiousness or nervousness in stressful situation to undertake a prompt decision, my ability to embrace unpredictable or ambiguous experience would enable me to evaluate various alternative options before taking a decision. This makes it suitable for considering rational decision-making style (Cook& Gonzales, 2016). Besides, I can also use the conscientiousness trait for discussion with others and listen to their opinions in such stressful situations for overcoming the anxiety or fear. This would enable me to undertake intuitiveand spontaneous decisions. On the other hand, the presence of extraversion is less than other traits. This shows that I possess a more introverted personality. It also enables me to analyse my decisions, evaluate alternative options and think strategically before taking any action. Introversion further helps me to be reflective thinker and work in solitude for performing various problem-solving tasks requiring insight and analysis (Erjavec, et al., 2019). This enhances the quality of the decisions as both intuition and rationality are present. On the other hand, I also possess significant amount of extraversion in my personality that enables me to be more active and enthusiastic for analysing various situations requiring personal interactions, stimulation and others.

Conclusion
From the above reflection, it is evident that both rational and intuition are required for today’s business managers in undertaking effective decisions. This is because the uncertainties, challenges and unpredictability are increasing in the competitive business environment. The reflective report helped in identifying the various personality traits present in my character that would help me in taking better decisions in both professional and personal context. In this regard, the identified traits portrayed various contrasting and similar views to the decision-making styles. However, it helped in pointing out the presence of rational and intuitive or spontaneous decision-making in my personality. ?

References
Abubakar, A. M., Elrehail, H., Alatailat, M. A., &Elçi, A. (2019). Knowledge management, decision-making style and organizational performance. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, 4(2), 104-114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jik.2017.07.003 Conitzer, V., Freeman, R., & Shah, N. (2017). Fair public decision making. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. 629-646.

Cook, C., & Gonzales, H. (2016). Australian individual decision styles, intuitive and rational decision making in business. International Proceeding of Economics Development and Research, 86.
Durupinar, F., Kapadia, M., Deutsch, S., Neff, M., &Badler, N. I. (2016). Perform: Perceptual approach for adding ocean personality to human motion using laban movement analysis. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 36(1), 1-16.
El Othman, R., El Othman, R., Hallit, R., Obeid, S., &Hallit, S. (2020). Personality traits, emotional intelligence and decision-making styles in Lebanese universities medical students. BMC psychology, 8(1), 1-14.https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-020-00406- Erjavec, J., Popovi?, A., &Trkman, P. (2019). The effect of personality traits and knowledge on the quality of decisions in supply chains.Management assignmentEconomic research-Ekonomskaistraživanja, 32(1), 2269-2292.https://doi.org/10.1080/1331677X.2019.1642788
Gou, X., Xu, Z., & Herrera, F. (2018). Consensus reaching process for large-scale group decision making with double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations. Knowledge-Based Systems, 157, 20-33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2018.05.008
Kaplan, A. D., Sanders, T., & Hancock, P. A. (2019). The relationship between extroversion and the tendency to Anthropomorphize robots: A Bayesian analysis. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 5, 135. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2018.00135 Weller, J., Ceschi, A., Hirsch, L., Sartori, R., &Costantini, A. (2018). Accounting for individual differences in decision-making competence: Personality and gender differences. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2258.https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02258

Appendix
Appendix: The Big Five Personality Test