MGT602 Business Decision Analytics: A Personal Reflection Essay

This essay provides a personal reflection on the experience of group-based decision making within a business analytics context. It identifies the easiest and most difficult aspects of a related exercise, focusing on sense-making, situation analysis, and the formulation of feasible solutions. The essay highlights challenges encountered during group decision-making, including communication errors, groupthink, group polarization, and social loafing, elaborating on their impact. It also discusses the role of ensuring every member contributes ideas and arguments, and the advantages of group-centric decision-making processes, such as the sharing of ideas and critical vetting by peers. The reflection concludes that group-based decision making is preferred due to the guarantee of critical assessment and the exposure of potential flaws in individual ideas.

Running head: PERSONAL INFORMATION
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Personal Reflection Paper
Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Affiliation
Date

PERSONAL INFORMATION
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Personal Reflection
The easiest part about the whole exercise was the formulation of feasible solutions to
the issues of salary and wage cost reduction and the determination of redundancy in the
company workforce. The most difficult part has to be the process of sense-making and
situation analysis. The development of arguments that critically and comprehensively
describe the issues highlighted in the case study was considerably challenging for me. With
regard to challenges associated with group-based decision making, the main problems
encounters were: communication errors, groupthink, group polarization, and social loafing.
Communication errors occurred resulted from poor understanding of what individuals in the
group we trying to share. As a result, there were misconceptions and misrepresentation of
argument given by team members. Groupthink was also observed when two members agreed
on a point but the third member was still apprehensive but in order to keep our evening
meetings going he/she was forced to agree with what was stated by the other two. Group
polarization was witnessed as in the formulation of solutions to the underlying case study
issues. For instance, the solution that the company should shut down to avoid further losses is
an extreme solution that would not have been considered by the team members individually.
Lastly, social loafing was the biggest issue because individuals were unable to effectively
contribute especially when another member demonstrate some level of expertise in a given
area. As such, a considerable amount of time was wasted trying to get all members to
contribute equally across all areas of the group-based decision making incentive (Ambrusy,
Greinerz, & Pathak, 2009).
I was given the role of ensuring that every member shared feasible ideas and
arguments that could then be discussed by the group as a whole. The valid points were passed
and documented while the points that were view unnecessary or speculative where dropped
from the decision-making process. There given advantages to group-based decision making

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that are voidable in individual-based decision making process. For example, group centric
decision making processes allow for the sharing of ideas that end up highlighting the pros and
cons of different solutions. This form of discussion is important because it allows individuals
to expose bad and retrogressive ideas. As such, I believe that group-based decision making is
more useful (especially in critical business matters) compared to individuals decision making.
In conclusion, I personally would much rather engage in group-based decision making
process because am guaranteed that all ideas I will suggest will be critically vetted by my
peers (Mukherjee, Dicks, et. al., 2016).

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References
Ambrusy, A., Greinerz, B., & Pathak, P. (2009). Group versus individual decision-making: Is
there a shift? University of New South Wales , 1-37.
Mukherjee, N., Dicks, L. V., Shackelford, G. E., Vira, B., & Sutherland, W. J. (2016).
Comparing groups versus individuals in decision making: A systematic review
protocol. Environmental Evidence , 1-9.