Decision Making and Conflict

Before tackling the class activity on decision making that we completed (on Monday 3/9/09. Let's breifly explain the most important aspects of decision making and conflict.

Decision making:
1- Is frustrating
2- Leads people to withdraw or disengage
3- Is prone to self-serving behavior
4- Is challenging under time constraints and uncertainty
5- Requires people to think more deeply about problems than going to a superficial understanding or firt response
6- Requires an interpaly between leader and group

Team Conflict - Causes:
1- Scarce resources
2- Who's in charge?
3- Poor communications: Misperceptions, misunderstandings
4- Personality clashes: differences in values, personality, attitudes
5- Power and status differences
6- Goal differences

How people handle conflict:
1- Compete to win: Assertiveness to get one's own idea
2- Avoidance: Withdrawal, used when there's " no chance " of winning
3- Compromise: used with decision making under pressure, all members are equal
4- Accommodation: seeing issue as more important to others than self
5- Collaboration: Bargaining and negotiation among group

With the concepts above, now we can try to analyze how the class decision making went. First, we have to agree that we all wanted the same goal( getting great grades) but different process to reach that goal( yes/no essay, yes/no short answers, yes/no multiple-multiple questions)so, people were trying to advocate for their areas( in the exam) of strength and other trying to get ride of areas of weaknesses which are legitimate approaches. Indeed, everybody is competing to win.
Given the size of the class( i can imagine Congress) and the time frame to reach the conclusion, it's understandable that withdrawal may occur, a matter of fact, it did happened.
I personally adapted the collaboration aspect of the decision making process that supports bargaining and negotiation among the group. By participating, other ideas are born and other solutions are added to the pile of the already existing solutions. In short, participating and collaboration create diversity in ideas and explore all the possible outcomes.
In the way the class activity was set up, done and given the class size in addition to time constraint, there's no other way, in my point of view, to do this better.