Decision-making is a crucial component of any organization management that can induce growth and success, as well as cause the company`s decline in certain sphere. It is an important process of responding to new opportunities and threats. Through innovation and out-of-the-box thinking leaders can achieve better results, and so that largely depends on whether they were able to create a Learning Organization (Jones & George, 2013). It is vital that an organization in principle could, firstly, assess and evaluate the issue on which a decision must be made, and, secondly, has the potential to respond to this issue in a creative and innovative manner. To ensure the latter, the spirit of learning and out-of-the box thinking must be promoted within the organization, so that all employees could come up with their ideas and influence the decision-making process.
Decision-making can be delegated to a single manager, as well as to a group of people. Groupthink is a more complex case, since all the members must find common ground and share a vision (Jones & George, 2013), which means that sometimes not the most reasonable and satisfactory alternative is chosen.
Regardless of the mode of decision-making, communication is the core element of decision-making process, which presupposes some emotional input. An emotionally intelligent decision-maker would be able to make better, healthier and more informed choices about issues at hand, due to his high awareness of his own emotional responses. For example, a manager might reject a good proposal from an employee he personally dislikes or finds irritating. An emotionally intelligent manager, though, would be able to differentiate between emotions, triggered by the employee (for instance, irritation due to the fact that the employee was late for the meeting), the evaluation of the proposal itself, and action (accept\reject proposal). A good leader would understand that the person who personally irritates him or her can, in fact, come up with a creative solution. In this way, emotional intelligence, “an ability to use your emotional knowledge of yourself and others to inform healthy choices” (Adler, 2014) is crucial to rational and competitive decision-making.
References
Adler, M. (2014). Emotional Intelligence: How Good Leaders Become Great. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA15YZlF_kM
Jones, G., & George, J. (2013). Decision Making, Learning, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship. In Essentials of Contemporary Management (pp. 146–173).
