Team Benefit during ‘Discomfort’
During which decision-making situations can teams be of particular use to organisations? Decision-making theory can identify five particularly important ones. Here is one of the five:
Whenever decisions need to be taken, which have uncomfortable consequences for many people, decisions by teams are more favourable. Why?
• Those who are affected by the negative consequences of decisions will easily seek guilty people and scapegoats. This is compounded when as many of the affected people as possible have been represented by members of decision-making committees. A good example of this is the success of the participation! The guiding process team preservation plays an important role here.
• If a team identifies with a decision, in which different interest positions and technical competences are represented, then the organisational environment will find it more difficult to suspect unclean or political chess moves. Here it becomes clear, how carefully one must handle the guiding process goal processing in such situations.
• If the team has jointly taken the risk of decision-making, it knows the discarded alternatives and is, therefore, less tempted to explain to the risk carriers, who are affected by the decision, that one ‘had to’ act like this. The less decision-makers hide behind so-called obligations (and that is easier when shared), the more probable it is that uncomfortable decisions are accepted.