THE PROCESS OF DECISION MAKING

Introduction
Decision making can be defined as "the act of choosing from among alternatives" (Naylor, 1998, p. 339). In the organization, decision making is quite important for the managers to choose the best choice for establishing their goals. Manager will make a rational and logical decision to overcome the issues. As Daft (2010) mentions, there are six important steps in the decision making process which are recognizing the problem, generating the solutions, evaluating the alternatives, choosing the best decision, implementing the alternative and evaluating the effective of decision (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix).
The process of decision making
The first step in the process of decision making is recognizing the problem. The existence of the problems means that there still have other ways or opportunities to improve the certain activity. Cooke and Slack (1991) recommend that recognize the problem emerges because there are a lot of mistakes and dissatisfactions occur either from internal or external organizations and this is a chance to carry out the improvements. Problem must be understood well by the manager to ensure the alternatives can be generated more clearly. When the organizations do not have enough funds for the next project, manager shall consider about the financial problem by referring the budget in each department. Besides that, problems can also be detected by using the intuition instead of evidence support (Cooke & Slack, 1991). For example, demand of the product and services have decreased. By using the intuition, an experience marketing department manager can directly sense and detect that the problem is being raised from the product itself like quality and price.
The second step in the decision making proce...

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...whole process (Cooke & Slack, 1991). For example, a manager expects to sell one hundred units of products with the gaining of ten thousand dollars profit but he fails to do so at the last. So, the manager shall redefine the problems. Lunenburg (2010) recommends that decision making process is constant and never ending. Evaluation of the outcome can be measured base on the satisfaction and dissatisfaction level of customers (Solomon & Stuart, 2000). Manager also can provide questionnaires to customers for the products’ evaluations. From those questionnaires, the customers’ points of view about their expectations after using the products like quality, attributes, functions and benefits of the products can be seen and referred. Once the decision making is carried out effectively and efficiently by the manager, the decision making process just can be considered as done.