Leader Decision Making Process Paper

Date: November 10, 2011

LEADER DECISION-MAKING PROCESS

INTRODUCTION

Decisions are at the heart of leadership success, however managers tend to treat decisions as events. But in fact decision making is a process that plays out over days, weeks, maybe even months, one that is charged with politics, personal conflicts; that needs to be backed up by each level in the organization in order to be implemented.
In this paper the leader decision making-process will be explored, through an example concerning the resolution of the deep water horizon disaster (BP Oil spill), presided over by President Barack Obama and Tony Hayward (Ex-CEO of BP).[1] Then, we will see how decision processes can come along - either through advocacy or inquiry.
“Critical thinking and rigorous debate invariably lead to conflict”[9] This means leaders must overcome conflict smoothly to make an effective decision. There are two kinds of conflict, cognitive or affective. Cognitive Conflict involves discussing all the details of certain case, by stating all the ideas, disagreements, assumptions, in order to solve the problem in a quicker and better way. Affective Conflict is, when the debate takes an emotional turn. Personal rivalries and ego bashing often play a critical role in forming affective conflict. Players involved, downplay the situation, or even withhold information, in order to push their ideas further. Affective conflict thus leads to the advocacy decision-making. Therefore, the goal of leaders in decision-making processes is: To elevate the cognitive conflict, while trying minimize affective conflict.

Affective Conflict - BP Oil Spill
During the BP Oil Spill the lack of communication between “Team Obama” and BP, turned out to be a big disaster. Each “team” blamed the other due to the lack of responsibilities, taking the matters into an affective conflict.[10] As mentioned before, the BP Executives also downplayed the situation, by hiding some information, about the extent of the leak, which lead to the faltering of the decision making process.

2.
b. LEADERS
Once followers are thoroughly impacted by their superiors they indirectly impact their leaders in a positive way, by providing their leaders better information and options. This causes leader to take better decisions. This good decision-making process strengthens the leader’s credibility and authority within their followers.

Followers negatively impact leaders - BP Oil Spill:
- Obama’s team wanted to keep this problem away from the President and delayed key decisions requested from local and state governments.[13]
- BP withheld crucial information from the US government and from the public.
- Lead to a Lack of credibility for BP leaders, and President Obama himself, when questions were raised about the delay in closure.[14]

c. ORGANIZATIONS
An organization benefits when it has a wealth of good leaders/managers and an excellent collaborative team which thrives with healthy conflict, meaningful voices, and efficiently managing the deadlines, when it comes to daily operations which flower out from decision making process.
Negative impacts on Organizations (BP, country, environment) - BP