Importance Of Group Decision Making

Decision making is an important task performed by each one of us during various stages of life.

There are different kinds of decisions such as ; work , school , university and personal life decisions.

Nevertheless decision making is one of the major and essential aspects of management . It can be defined as " the process of selecting a logical choice from the available options".

In taking decisions positive and negative aspects of each alternative must be considered.

For powerful and valid decision making individuals are required to be able to estimate the result of each opportunity and to figure out what is the best alternative between the options.

Decision making is not as easy as it seems that is why usually decisions are made by groups

This process may be both formal and informal but the majority of the times it is formally structured with specific goals to achieve.

An important distinction should be made between group-decision making and teams , who work in a more cooperative way and where leadership roles are shared while groups deal with a single leader , moreover group members are required to have individual responsibility and liability.

There are different ways to approach group-decision making and the most used are : Brain storming , Nominal group technique and Electronical / Delphi technique used in cases of different locations.

Working with others is not simple in fact numerous factors are to be considered during collective work and decisions , cultural and geographical diversities may influence the group in a negative way and at the same time , age differences play a big role as well in affecting the group.

However once these negative aspects are overcome the result of the work a group makes is often very efficient and high quality , in fact most of the times group-decision making has a lot of advantages over individual

Group decisions are usually more accurate and creative and the final decision is always reviewed by all the members.

These features are the basic points of how a group should work and collaborate , by following them satisfying results will be seen.

Still among these great advantages , as everything group decision making can also lead to some disadvantages that should be avoided .

First of all members of groups must have an appropriate behavior within the others and education is the essential element that should be part of all the members.

If there is no complicity and collaboration between members then the possibilities to produce acceptable and satisfying results are scarce.

Time is another essential element in the management environment and group decisions usually take longer time than individual decisions so it is difficult to deal with groups if decisions are to be made quickly.

Having to deal with more than one person who often can share a different culture , way of working and communicating can be the cause of the creation of conflicts which may slow down the decision making process or that can completely sabotage the decision. So personal interests can have negative impacts on the decision making .It could also happen that the decision taken by groups do not correspond to the specific goal because of the different ideas each member