Learning and Decision Making

Learning and Decision Making

1. Types of Knowledge:

   • Explicit Knowledge: The kind of information you're likely to think about when you picture someone sitting down at a desk to learn; easily communicated and what is taught during training sessions.
   • Tacit Knowledge: What employees can typically learn only through experience; not easily communicated. Up to 90 percent of the knowledge contained in organizations occurs in tacit form.

2. Decision Making: The process of generating and choosing from a set of alternatives to solve a problem.

3. Learning: Reflects relatively permanent changes in an employee's knowledge or skill that result from experience.

4. Expertise: The knowledge and skills that distinguish experts from novices and less experienced people.

5. Methods of Learning

   • Reiforcement
     • Contingencies of Reinforcement: Four specific consequences typically used by organizations to modify employee behavior.
       • Positive Reinforcement Occurs when a positive outcome follows a desired behavior
       • Negative Reinforcement: Occurs when an unwanted outcome is removed following a desired behavior.
       • Punishment: Occurs when an unwanted outcome follows an unwanted behavior.
       • Extinction: Occurs when there is the removal of a consequence following an unwanted behavior.
     • Schedules Of Reinforcement: The timing of when contingencies are applied
       • Continuous Reinforcement: The simplest schedule and happens when a specific consequence follows each and every occurence of a desired behavior.
       • Fixed Interval Schedule: The single most common form of reinforcement schedule; workers are rewarded after a set amount of time.
       • Variable Interval Schedule: Designed to reinforce behavior at more random points in time.
       • Fixed Ratio Schedules: Reinforce behaviors after a certain number of them have been exhibited.
       • Variable Ratio Schedules: Reward people after a varying number of exhibited behaviors.
   • Observation
     • Social Learning Theory Argues that people in organizations have the ability to learn through the observation of others
       • Behavioral Modeling: When employees observe the actions of others, learn from what they observe, and then repeat the observed behavior.
   • Goal Orientation
     • Learning Orientation: Building competence is deemed more important than demonstrating competence.
       • "Learning oriented" people enjoy working on new kinds of tasks, even if they fail during their early experiences; view failure in positive terms - as a means of increasing knowledge and skills in the long run.
     • Performance Prove Orientation: Focus on demonstrating their competence so that others think favorably of them.
     • Performance-Avoid Orientation: Focus on demonstrating their competence so that others will not think poorly of them.

6. Methods of Decision Making

   • Programmed Decisions: Decisions that become somewhat automatic because people's knowledge allows them to recognize and identify a situation and the course of action that needs to be taken.
     • Intuition: Emotionally charged judgments that arise through quick, non-conscious and holistic associations.
       • Crisis: Situation Is a change - whether sudden or evolving - that results in a urgent problem that must be addressed immediately.
   • Nonprogrammed Decision: When a situation arises that is new, complex, and not recognized.
     • As employees move up the corporate ladder, a larger percentage of their decisions become less and less programmed
   • Rational Decision-Making Model: Offers a step-by-step approach to making decisions that maximize outcomes by examining all available alternatives.

7. Decision Making Problems

   • Limited Information
     • Bounded Rationality: The notion that decision makers simply do not have the ability or resources to process all available information and alternatives to make an optimal decision.
       • “we are not as rational as we think we are”
     • Satisficing: When decision makers select the first acceptable acceptable alternative considered.
   • Faulty Perceptions
     • Selective Perception: The tendency for people to see their environment only as it affects them and as it is consistent with their expectations.
     • Projection Bias: Belief that others think, feel, and act the same way they do.
     • Social Identity Theory: Holds that people identify themselves by the groups to which they belong and perceive and judge others by their group memberships.
     • Stereotype: When assumptions are made about others on the bais of their membership in a social group.
     • Heuristics: Simple, efficient, rules of thumb that allow us to make decisions more easily; used when confronted with situations of uncertainty that require a decision on our part.
       • Availability Bias: The tendency for people to base their judgments on information that is easier to recall.
       • Decision Making Biases
   • Faulty Attributions
     • Fundamental Attribution Error Argues that people have a tendency to judge others' behaviors as due to internal factors
     • Self-Serving Bias Occurs when we attribute our own failures to external factors and our own successes to internal factors
     • Attribution Process:
       • • 1. Consensus: Did others act the same way under similar situations?
         • 2. Distinctiveness: Does this person tend to act differently in other circumstances?
         • 3. Consistency: Does this person always do this when performing this task?
         • An internal attribution will occur if there is low consensus, low distinctiveness, and high consistency
         • An external attribution will occur if there is high consensus, high distinctiveness, and low consistency
   • Escalation of Commitment
     • The decision to continue to follow a failing course of action

8. Training: A systematic effort by organizations to facilitate the learning of job-related knowledge and behavior.

   • Knowledge Transfer: Older experienced employees share their knowledge of a job with younger inexperienced employees.
     • Behavior Modeling Training: Employees have the ability to observe and learn from those in the company with significant amounts of tacit knowledge.
     • Communities Of Practice: Groups of employees who work together and learn from one another by collaborating over an extended period of time.
     • Transfer Of Training: Occurs when the knowledge, skills, and behaviors, used on the job are maintained by the learner once training ends and generalized to the workplace one the learner returns to the job.
       • Climate For Transfer: An environment that can support the use of new skills.

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