Ethical Decision Making: Overconfidence, Bounded Awareness, Motivation And Emotion, Fairness And Equity

Overconfidence

Discuss about the Ethical Decision Making.

James Den is a principal consultant at Antonia Systems, a leading IT company that develops a customized tool to handle finances of its clients. The tool FI Handler has several templates in it. Each of this template relates to different businesses and depending on the client a template is chosen with the basic settings and additional settings are made according to the requirement. Antonia Systems is a start-up and hence currently has about 10 clients. The Principal Consultant James Den and his team of five have worked with all the 10 clients and hence is regarded as a top notch employee of the company. A new client Drena Delivery Services have reached Antonia Systems in the month of September 2014 with a request to develop FI Handler by the month of January 2015 so that they have time to move their existing finance data by March 2015 and completely migrate to FI Handler from the new fiscal year.

The company handed over the account to James Den. At the requirements gathering James Den has met the clients alone insisting on his ability to handle. The meeting lasted for 15 minutes with James Den promising the client that the tool would be delivered within three weeks of requirement gathering, as they have already developed a similar customization for another delivery service. The client was asked to email all their requirements by October 2015 and an SLA was signed (Wu, 2012). It was only after the requirements were received, that James Den realized his mistake. Drena Delivery Systems had banking accounts all over the world and the company dealt in fifty currencies, while the one that James Den worked on operated only in one currency and hence, it would take more than three months to deliver the tool.

In this case an anchoring heuristic is seen with James Den marking his past client as an arbitrary start without understanding the requirements of the new client. The time line suggestion and the signing of SLA without gathering requirements shows overconfidence and measures the bias in decision making (Fast, 2012). In these cases, it is ideal to treat every client as a start and understand that each business is different from another even if the working ground is same. Realizing the same will help the employer be more vigilant in estimating timelines and what a company can and cannot do.

Bounded Awareness

Ayana is a 24 year old bank teller who works at one of the branches of National Australian Bank.  She supports her mother and sister financially and hence works as a tutor in her free time. She is a healthy woman with a curvy physique and a beautiful face. However, Ayana is not very satisfied with the way she looks. An addict to social networking, Ayana follows most of the celebrities on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter all of whom have a Runway model figure. Ayana dreams to be like one of these woman and often takes up extreme diets and workout regimes but fails to accomplish any of them as her work routine gets tedious (Duck, 2014). Every time she gives up on one of these diets or workout regimes she blames herself assuming that she is insufficient and good for nothing.

Ayana’s decision in relation to her diet regimes is impacted by the Retrievability bias. Since, Ayana spends a tremendous amount of time following size two celebrities, her memory is filled with images of slim models and hence her first though of an ideal woman would be a model walking down a ramp. Due to Focalism, Ayana misses the fundamentals such as the number of women who are actually size two are in far less percentages when compared to women with a healthy body type (Noval, 2016). She does not see the countless women of all body types walking in and out of the bank every day. Her lifestyle, genetics, work schedule need to be considered before she takes up a diet routine which is missed by Ayana. To ensure the bias is minimized, it is necessary to be aware of the surroundings. A clear understanding of her own reality and an analysis of how she has to adjust her lifestyle is required for Ayana to succeed (Verly, 2015). Once the analysis is made, Ayana can go about making moderate changes to her schedules.

James was a program manager of a reputed firm and had sent one of his team mate Dan to the client location in a different country. After two months, James has received a call from the client stating that Dan has not showed up at work and has not informed anyone about his whereabouts. James immediately tried to contact Dan on his mobile to understand the issue. However, despite several calls Dan has not picked James calls or responded to any of the text messages sent by James. Unfortunately Dan’s mobile broke a week before and hence would only vibrate because of which missed a couple calls but immediately called back. James had Dan’s roommate’s number as an emergency contact for Dan in the client location and called the contact. The roommate informed James that Dan was fine and was sleeping when he left for work. This made James furious. He expected Dan to call him back, but the same dint happen. Out of anger James informed the client that Dan would be replaced in the next twenty four hours and dropped a mail to the HR for action against Dan stating that Dan had been irresponsible since his visit to the client location.

Motivation and Emotion

The decision made by James here is a result of an emotional outburst coupled with the incorrect estimation of probability of conjunctive events (Lerner, 2015). Dan had been at the client location for two months but had issues with his mobile only in the last week. However, when James called on the day of the issue and Dan hasn’t picked the call, James had overestimated the occurrence of the event where Dan has not picked the call and based on the same requested for a HR action. The extent of these actions show the measure of bias by James (Thiel, 2012). To avoid such scenarios, James must learn to limit the influence of emotions in decision making. Rational thinking and giving the other person a chance to explain are a few ways to overcome such situations. Being aware of one’s self before making a decision is crucial to minimize the impact of emotions (Ashley, 2012).

Roy and Rose are twins born into a financial backward family. The family had promised to wed Rose to a close relative once her education completes. Rose has accepted the proposal and is happy with her parent’s decision of letting her study. However, at the end of her school, Rose has informed her parents that she would like to pursue engineering as she had a liking for machines and scored high in all the relevant subjects. Roy on the other hand had completed school with average score and had no interest in further studies. He wanted to start his own business with one of his friends and believed his idea would be a hit in the market, though no investors have come forward to support his start-up. Both the kids came up to their parents with their individual decisions and their parents have decided to support Roy as he would stay back with them while Rose would leave the house anyway. Roy’s business had no potential investors and Rose had pointed out several flaws in the business proposition of Roy. Yet, their parents stuck to their decision to invest in the boy rather than the girl who wedding has been fixed.

In such situations, stereotype bias is seen (Wyer, 2013). These situations are extremely common in several other walks of life, like the notion that Indians are taxi drivers or all white Americans hate black skinned people or that household work is meant for women and so on. The extent of bias varies from situation to situation. In this case, the girl was not alone deprived of education but was also promised to a man even before her life in a school completed. Several steps are being taken to avoid stereotype scenarios. Self-awareness is a key step to eradicate this kind of bias. Fairness and equity have to be given prominence when taken any decisions to ensure that no one is a victim of stereotypes (Spencer, 2016)

References

Ashley, G. C., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2012). Self-awareness and the evolution of leaders: The need for a better measure of self-awareness. Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, 14(1), 2.

Duck, S. (2014). Paleo diet: Health experts slam chef Pete Evans for pushing extreme views. Sunday Herald Sun, 7.

Fast, N. J., Sivanathan, N., Mayer, N. D., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Power and overconfident decision-making. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 117(2), 249-260.

Lerner, J. S., Li, Y., Valdesolo, P., & Kassam, K. S. (2015). Emotion and Decision Making: Online Supplement. Annu. Rev. Psychol, 66, 33-1.

Noval, L. J. (2016). On the misguided pursuit of happiness and ethical decision making: The roles of focalism and the impact bias in unethical and selfish behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 133, 1-16.

Spencer, S. J., Logel, C., & Davies, P. G. (2016). Stereotype threat. Annual review of psychology, 67, 415-437.

Thiel, C. E., Bagdasarov, Z., Harkrider, L., Johnson, J. F., & Mumford, M. D. (2012). Leader ethical decision-making in organizations: Strategies for sensemaking. Journal of Business Ethics, 107(1), 49-64.

Verly-Jr, E., Baltar, V. T., Fisberg, R. M., & Marchioni, D. M. (2015). Dealing with day-to-day Variance in Dietary Intake: Regression Calibration for Diet-Disease Risk Models. International Journal of Epidemiology, 44(suppl 1), i8-i8.

Wu, L., & Buyya, R. (2012). Service Level Agreement (SLA) in utility computing systems. IGI Global.

Wyer, R. S. (2013). Stereotype activation and inhibition: Advances in social cognition (Vol. 11). Psychology Press.