Managing Under Uncertainty For ABC Consultants

The Situation

Discuss about the Managing Under Uncertainty for ABC Consultants.

This is the story of Joy, a woman who has been working in the ABC Consultants for 20 years. The workplace situation has been giving her sleepless nights, pain in the stomach and headaches. The increasing symptoms list scared the beats out her. Such was the conflict at her workplace that she even experienced a sudden panic attack, her first in the nearly 20 years of her work experience. There are various workplace situations or conflicts that crop up every day in organization like fired for being sick, unpaid after doing overtime and even the obsessive and compulsive behavior.

Joy was in love with her job, but in recent times she has been considering quitting. The boss she was assigned under for so many years have received a well-deserved promotion a few months back. Joy was then assigned under a new supervisor, someone who has been posed as a challenge for Joy. This situation cropped up one fine morning when the new supervisor of Joy confronted her of a complaint that has been lodged against her by one of her co-workers. The complaint was instead of emailing about the project to the members of the team, she should have just strolled down the hall and work out the information in person (Sonnentag, Unger & Nägel, 2013).

Joy over the years has been struggling with an ‘invisible disability’ that made walking difficult sometimes. Recent stress within the workplace had caused the symptoms to flicker. Her doctor advised her to restrict the quantity of walking. Joy tried to explain all these restrictions and limitations to her boss, however the boss paid no heed to her words and moreover reacted harshly, threatening to dispel her from work. Moreover, the new boss stated that the management has not been happy with such reluctance from a senior pro like Joy, stating that face-to-face communication is important instead of sending mails (Gilin Oore, Leiter & LeBlanc, 2015).

The new boss’s harsh behavior and threat of expelling Joy from work made Joy decide on quitting her job after discussions with her husband, Tim. Tim advised her of taking the matter to the next point that is meeting the human resource department of the company. The HR manager had a brief discussion with Joy and promised her of fixing a date for a detailed discussion on the matter.

The Issue

As discussed in the above segment, Joy has been put under immense stress at her workplace by her new boss where she is being threatened to be dispelled from work for not being mobile at work floor, though everybody knew she had some restrictions in her movement. Leaving the job might be an easy decision that would enable her to get relieved from all the stress she has been going through. Though Joy took the matter to the next level, she was not sure whether she was doing the right thing. She thought of making use of the rational decision making model

On the first instance, Joy requires defining the issue. This step would be moderately easier for Joy, as the new boss of Joy has already identified the issue which is lack of mobility and agility of Joe on the work floor (Renfree et al., 2014). Her restriction in physical movement has led to complaints from her co-workers that Joy does not focus much on face-to-face communication or discussing over important topics sitting together. She is more into sending emails and chatting through online which is not what team members wants.

The next part in the process of rational decision making is in recognizing the criteria of the decision. This step is mainly about selecting the variables that would be determining the outcome of the decision (Gigerenzer, 2015). In the case of Joy, her anger and her pride has led to this conflict, she could have been more patient in making others understand what led to her being such immobile at work-floor. The criterion is mainly dependent on the values and beliefs of the individuals. Joy would be making her decision which would be based on her conviction that she would be discussing in-depth about the illness she has along with the letter from her doctor. Her criteria would be:

1. How can she change the frustration of her immobility?
2. How can an agreement be reached that meets organizational objectives, yet takes in her limitations?

The next step for Joy would be to allocate the criteria weights. This takes in the ranking of the criteria based on their significance to the process of decision making. According to Joy the biggest weight should be provided to the fact on the easy of meeting the objectives of the organizations taking into consideration the limitations Joy has on physical grounds (Pettigrew, 2014). The other weight would then be dispersed. The next segment would start in considering the solutions.

The next part is developing the alternatives where the probable solutions require to be measured. No consideration would be there in this step, just the presence of generalized list of alternatives. Joy has listed down some of the solutions that are of alternative nature (Baumann et al., 2014).

1. Joy might be more involved with the members of the team in person.
2. Instead of emailing, Joy might have discussion with her team members over telephone or through video conferencing.
3. Keeping a fixed time on weekends to meet Joy with all the issues.

The Rational Model

Under the present circumstances, Joy needs considering the list of alternatives she developed.

Leading up to the meeting, Joy have been spending the weekends evaluating the alternatives and praying that all remains at place (Gigerenzer, 2015). Joy needs to see the choice that would be least impacting her fellow workers and team members yet solve the issue of the face-to-face communication that is so required for someone holding an important position in the company. After much of the consideration, Joy decided to submit a report before the meeting stating all these to ease the overall situation.

This is the final step within the model that entails computing of the most favorable decision. This would be done by Joy after evaluating each of the alternatives against the subjective criteria along with selecting of the alternatives having the highest overall score.

The stress that Joy was going through would only be possible to understand if I put myself in her shoes. Workplace stress and conflict situations are not new in organizations; however matters like that of Joy’s are hard to find. Bounded rationality is a term that was first being coined by Herbert Simon. His argument was that under real situation circumstances, people would be taking decisions on the source of heuristics instead of the rule based methods of optimization.

Lack of proper information or information of incomplete nature often leads to most favorable decisions as the decision-maker; Joy was not fully sentient of the pros and cons of the decision (Chrisman, Memili & Misra, 2014). Lack of proper information often leads to creation of boundaries and hindering the choice rationally of the decision-maker. I would not have probably hastily said to my immediate boss that I am unable to take the stress and that I would be quitting the job. If I would have been at her place, I would have asked my boss for a bit of her time and would have made her understand citing the medical documents. It was not something that was being done by Joy purposefully, but her movement was being restricted due to her immobility. She had the required documents in proving her situation. She could have handled this in better way, though she never knew that her general stating of quitting the job would become such big issue within the organization.

The issue at hand might be so intricate that the decision-maker might not be able to understand the complexity of the issues, leading to the sub optimal decision (Felin et al., 2014). If the issue had been logical, the decision maker would have been in a position in making the rational choice. This has been generating a boundary on the otherwise rational alternative of the decision maker. Joy has been working for more than 20 years yet she forgot the essence of face-to-face communication. I would have stated my position to my team members beforehand and let them know they are free to visit me with any issues as and when required. There was lack of any sort of communication between Joy and other team members as nobody knew the situation of Joy and the issues she was facing within. Lacking information led to such circumstances for Joy, which I would have avoided with prior discussion to with the people concerned.

The lack of time might lead to suboptimal decisions as the decision maker does not have enough time in evaluating the choices and coming to a rational alternative. Lack of time often leads such inappropriate decisions as one does not have the requisite time in processing the available information (Foss & Weber, 2016). It is important to give oneself sometime at the end of the day to reflect on the things that have taken place in the day. Joy could not, she was so stressed out, she was facing health issues because of the stressed out factors at workplace. Joy had her husband to discuss these things, but she kept it to herself, she could have atleast communicated with someone close in the office. Even after the complaint came in, Joy was quick to react rather than r5efoecting on what went wrong and what has been the source of complaint.

Reference:

Baumann, D. J., Fluke, J. D., Dalgleish, L., & Kern, H. (2014). The decision making ecology. From evidence to outcomes in child welfare: An international reader, 24-40.

Chrisman, J. J., Memili, E., & Misra, K. (2014). Nonfamily managers, family firms, and the winner’s curse: The influence of noneconomic goals and bounded rationality. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 38(5), 1103-1127.

Felin, T., Kauffman, S., Koppl, R., & Longo, G. (2014). Economic opportunity and evolution: Beyond landscapes and bounded rationality. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 8(4), 269-282.

Foss, N. J., & Weber, L. (2016). Moving opportunism to the back seat: Bounded rationality, costly conflict, and hierarchical forms. Academy of Management Review, 41(1), 61-79.

Gigerenzer, G. (2015). Simply rational: Decision making in the real world. Evolution and Cognition.

Gilin Oore, D., Leiter, M. P., & LeBlanc, D. E. (2015). Individual and organizational factors promoting successful responses to workplace conflict. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 56(3), 301.

Pettigrew, A. M. (2014). The politics of organizational decision-making. Routledge.

Renfree, A., Martin, L., Micklewright, D., & Gibson, A. S. C. (2014). Application of decision-making theory to the regulation of muscular work rate during self-paced competitive endurance activity. Sports Medicine, 44(2), 147-158.

Sonnentag, S., Unger, D., & Nägel, I. J. (2013). Workplace conflict and employee well-being: The moderating role of detachment from work during off-job time. International Journal of Conflict Management, 24(2), 166-183.