Decision Making
Dr. Len Elovitz
Chapter 9 in Owens &
Valesky
Total Quality Management
TQM is a management approach for an
organization, centered on quality, based
on the participation of all its members
and aiming at long-term success
through customer satisfaction, and
benefits to all members of the
organization and to society
Dr. W. Edwards Deming
WWII
- trained American managers
for war production
Brought to Japan by MacArthur in
1950
Brought TQM back to the US as a
consultant
Deming’s 14 points
(1)
Create constancy of purpose for
improvement of product and service.
(2) Adopt the new (Deming) philosophy.
(3) Cease dependence on inspection to
achieve quality.
(4) End the practice of awarding business
on the basis of price alone.
(5) Improve constantly and forever every
process.
Deming’s 14 points
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
Institute training on the job.
Adopt and institute leadership.
Drive out fear.
Break down barriers between staff
areas.
(10) Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and
targets for the staff
(11) Eliminate numerical quotas for the
staff and goals for management.
Deming’s 14 points
(12)
Remove barriers that rob people of
pride of workmanship.
(13) Institute a vigorous program of
education and self improvement for
everyone.
(14) Put everybody in the organization to
work to accomplish the transformation.
William Glasser
The Quality School
Deming’s
Basics
Managing
without Coercion
Eliminate all threats & fears
Principals and teachers must be friends
Principals must treat teachers well
Emphasizing
Reference
Quality
is mostly toward teachers
providing meaningful work for students
Students
Evaluate Their Work
The Quality Revolution in Education
John Jay Bonstingl
Doyle and Kearns (1983)
 The
modem school should look less like a factory and
more like our best high-tech companies with lean
structures, flat organizations, and decision making
pushed to the lowest possible level ... [with] fewer
middle managers, and those that remain act(ing) less
like controllers and more like colleagues and
collaborators
 Under TQM, the traditional bureaucratic organization
must be practically transformed into a new one. It
must become a flat organization with lean structures
and a decision making process different from the one
in bureaucratic organizations
 Doyle
and Kearns' observation about simplifying the
organizational structure is supported by Peters and
Waterman, authors of In Search of Excellence
(1982), who indicate that excellent companies have
simple organizational structures and lean staffs.
Bosting (1992) observes that, "Bureaucracies are
being sculptured and hierarchies flattened to give
more control over quality to those on the front lines".
The message for the educational administrator can
be summarized with the KISS philosophy: "Keep it
simple, stupid."
 In
terms of the decision making process, TQM
emphasizes involving people in the organization in
decision making. Hemlock (1992) suggests that in the
better firms, managers involve everyone in the
decision making process. TQM implies a participatory
managerial approach as opposed to the bureaucratic
decisions made by top administrators and imposed
upon the employees. The message for the
educational administrator is that decisions should not
be unilateral and much less imposed upon
subordinates.
 Doyle
and Kearns indicate that managers should be
colleagues and collaborators. This is the idea of
"teamwork" which is central to TQM. Marchese
(1991) observes that "Unlike committees, teams
aren't representative-, they bring together most or all
of the people who work in a process to work on its
improvement, no others need apply... It believes in
the superiority of collaborative work that achieves
"team learning". Teamwork also leads to what Senge
(1990) refers to as "organizational learning.
 Organizations
must become places where people
expand their capacity to create the results they truly
desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking
are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free,
and where people are continually learning how to
learn together. The message is that managers
department heads, supervisors, or other
administrative personnel should not act as feudal
lords, owners of lives and property of those who work
for them. There are no bosses in a TQM organization
but collaborators. Deming's idea is that there should
be collaboration and cooperation for the achievement
of quality.
Some Recommendations
 1.Empowering
people; Marchese (1991) advises,
"Stop attacking people"... drive out fear; from the
work place. Marchese further observes that, "TQM
empowers people by trusting our employees... to act
responsibly and giving them appropriate authority;
 "2.Showing respect and concern for everyone no
matter what that person does in that organization;
 3.Creating
a nonthreatening atmosphere, that is,
establishing a psychological climate that is conducive
to security and learning-4.Keeping in mind that
people are more important than procedures and
structures. Groff (199 1) indicates that people are the
most valuable resource any organization has;
 5.Exercising transformational more than transactional
leadership;
 6.Motivating and rewarding people for their
contributions;
 7.Sharing rather than imposing decisions on people;
 8.Communicating as opposed to hiding information to
exercise control;
 9.Practicing what is preached.
 The
message is that implementing TQM means a
change, a radical change, in administrative style as
well as in attitude. The administrative style described
by McGregor in theory X, and which many
administrators still utilize, contradicts the TQM
philosophy. If the administrator is not willing to modify
his or her managerial style, then TQM should not be
implemented.
 Advocates
of TQM indicate that in order to implement
this managerial philosophy, fewer managers at least
of the old type-powerful figures in sole command of
vertical authority structures, are needed. Instead,
they want leaders, vision givers, listeners, teamworkers, orchestrators and enablers of people-driven
improvement. It seems there is not much place under
TQM for the traditional, authoritarian, inflexible, type
of administrator. This TQM message is crystal clear.
Decision Making
Decision
Making is at the heart of
organizational effectiveness, climate, and health.
Two dominant issues affect how decisions are
made in organizations;
Stability
(application of existing practices and maintenance of
existing performance levels)
Change (environmental demands for quick response and
emerging problems that are ambiguous)
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Participative
decision making structures are
required to effectively manage change.
Empowering
people to participate in important
decisions is highly motivating to them
Broad participation infuses the decisionmaking process with the full spectrum of
knowledge and good ideas that people
throughout the organization have to contribute
Decision Making
Daniel
Griffith’s Theory of Leadership is
About Decision Making
Administration
is decision making
Organization’s structure is determined by the nature
of its decision making process
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Griffith (continued)
An
individual's rank equals his or her degree of
control of the decision-making process.
Effectiveness
of the leader is inversely proportional
to the number of decisions made personally.
The
major differences between types of
organizations are related to differences in the
decision-making process.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Individual v. Organizational
Decision Making
What
is meant by the expectation that
administrators should be “decisive”?
 How is this different from “organizational
decisions”?
It is the responsibility of administrators to
establish decision-making processes that
establish a positive culture.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Rationality in Decision Making
Herbert
Simon’s three phases of decision
making:
Intelligence
activity - gathering information
regarding the need for a decision to be made
Design activity - alternatives are envisioned,
developed and analyzed
Choice activity - selecting a course of action
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Peter
Drucker’s rational steps in decision making:
Define
the Problem
Analyze the Problem
Develop Alternative Solutions
Decide on the Best Solution
Convert decisions into Effective Actions
The
above models assume that
decision-making is an orderly, rational
process that possesses an inner logic,
and that
The steps in the process follow one
another in an orderly, logical and
sequential flow
Rational Decision-Making
Models
Some
models add a “feedback loop” to make
successively better decisions eventually reaching
“optimal” decisions.
We must recognize that we generally make
decisions that are called “satisficing”, that is, they
are a solution that is satisfactory, but not
necessarily the optimal solution. Why?
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
What
are the possibilities for the
roles of the leader and members of
the organization for decision making?
Roles in Decision Making
Vroom and Yetton
Autocratic Process:
 AI. Leaders makes decision with information available.
 AII. Leader gets information from followers (may not tell
them the
problem) and then makes decision.
 Consultative Process:
 CI. Leader shares problem with individuals, gets suggestions, then
makes decision.
 CII. Leader shares problem with the group and then makes
decision.
 Group Process:
 GI. Leaders facilitates a group decision based on consensus. The
leader avoids giving his/her opinion, but lets the group decide.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Who should be involved in the decision
 Analysis
of the situation depends on answers to 7
questions:
 Does
 Does
the problem possess a quality requirement? (i.e., time)
the leaders have sufficient information to make a good
decision?
 Is the problem structured?
 Is it necessary for others to accept the decision in order for it to be
implemented?’
 If the leaders makes the decision alone, how certain is it that others
will accept it?
 Do others share the organizational goals that will be attained by
solving this problem?
 Are the preferred solutions to the problem likely to create conflict
among others in the group?
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
You’ve got to be kidding
Are you Kidding?
The Nature of Managerial and
Administrative Work
Henry Mintzberg’s five propositions:





Administrators do a great deal of work, and do it at an
unrelenting pace.
Administrators devote brief periods to many decisions
that tend to be specific, well defined issues.
Administrators prefer to deal with active problems that
are well defined and non-routine.
Administrators prefer verbal communications.
Administrators maintain working relationships with three
principal groups: superiors, subordinates, and outsiders.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Mintzberg (continued)
The
work of administrators is taxing. He states:
“The quantity of work to be done . . .during the
day is substantial and the pace is unrelenting.”
An “unrelenting pace” is not an unvarying pace,
but that there is always more work to do, and that
administrators seldom stop thinking about their
work.
Mintzberg’s work has been confirmed in studies
done with school administrators.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
How Administrators Think
 Do
administrators apply rational (linear) decision making
principles to decision making, and are they reflective about the
decisions they make?
 Perhaps,
but Karl Weick believes that administrators’ thinking is
woven into, and simultaneously occurs with, action.
 Schön
agrees, believing that decision making is an art, or trained
intuition. That is, one learns through education and experience to
see a complex system and to view a decision holistically.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Influence of Organizational
Culture on Decision Making
The
norms, values, traditions, and beliefs of an
organization shape decision making.
Weick believes that culture helps participants
ascribe credibility to interpretations they make of
their experiences.
Therefore, the culture represents significant
thinking prior to action and is implicit in the
decision making of administrators.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Theory of Practice
The
overlapping theories of many scholars
provide the basis for HRD concepts: motivation,
leadership, conflict management, decision making,
and change.
Some cultures are more effective in implementing
HRD concepts.
Together these HRD concepts constitute a theory
of decision making, the centerpiece of which is
participative methods or empowerment.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Participative Decision Making
Potential benefits:
Make better decisions
Enhance the growth and
Tannenbaum
development of participants
and Schmidt’s Model provides a
range of potential decision making options for a
leader and the organization. This ranges from the
leader making the decision to a team making the
decision within limits defined by organizational
constraints.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Participative or Democratic
Democratic
decision making may involve a vote, with
the majority winning.
As participation in decisions increases, teachers’ power
and influence increase and principals’ power and
influence decrease.
The leader should work with participants in the
organization to establish a process for making decisions.
Participants should evaluate how the process is working
and suggest changes for making the process better.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Emergent and Discrete
Problems
 Discrete
problems: elements are unambiguous, clear-cut and
quantifiable; elements are readily separable; solution requires a
logical sequence of acts by one person; and the boundaries of the
problem are easily discernable.
 Bus
routes, purchasing
 Emergent
problems: ambiguous, uncertain and not easily
quantifiable; elements are intertwined; solution requires
coordination and interaction of many; the dimensions of the
problem cannot be fully known until the process begins to
unfold.
 Curriculum
adoption
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Administrators
or experts can make decisions for
discrete problems, while emergent problems are
best made with open communication among those
individuals who have information and who will be
involved in implementing the decision.
Who Should Participate?
:
Test
of Relevance--when they have an important
personal stake in the problem and their interest is high
Teaching methods and materials
Discipline
Curriculum
Organizing for instruction
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Test of Expertise–they can contribute
competently to the solution.

Area
Test
of discipline English v. PE
of Jurisdiction—if a problem is in their
jurisdiction or within their work domain allow
participation, but if not, don’t allow them to
decide as it may lead to frustration.
Chester Barnard
Zone
of Indifference - Involving teachers in matters
about which they don’t care
Zone
of Sensitivity - Matters in which teachers have
great personal interest over time
Zone
of Ambivalence - Matters where teachers have
some stake but not enough to make them concerned
Team Administration

Five techniques of team administration:
Discussion – Head decides
Information seeking – Head decides
Democratic-centralist – Head decides
Parliamentarian – Group decides (vote)
winners and losers
Participant-determining – Group decides
(consensus)
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007
Participation,
however, requires a high
level of skills, in particular training in the
group process.
Trust
building
Conflict management
Problem solving
Communications
A Paradigm for Decision Making
Using
the four typical steps in the rational model
of decision making, the administrator can choose
to include others in any or all of the steps:
Defining the problem
Identifying possible alternative solutions
Predicting the consequences of each alternative
Choosing the alternative to follow
In
other words, the administrator can make the
decision alone, use their input to make the
decision, or make a group decision.
Copyright (c) Allyn & Bacon
2007