1) Many decisions have elements of both types of decisions and are semistructured, where only part of the problem has a clear-cut answer provided by an accepted procedure.
2) Senior executives face many unstructured decision situations, such as establishing the firm’s five- or ten-year goals or deciding new markets to enter.
3) Operational management and rank-and-file employees tend to make more structured decisions.
4) Design involves identifying and exploring various solutions to the problem.
5) Choice consists of choosing among solution alternatives.
6) Implementation involves making the chosen alternative work and continuing to monitor how well the solution is working.
7) Classical models of management state that the actual behaviour of managers appears to be less systematic, more informal, less reflective, more reactive, and less well organized than the classical model would have us believe.
8) Behavioural roles are expectations of the activities that managers should perform in an organization.
9) Knowledge workers act as figureheads for the organization when they represent their companies to the outside world and perform symbolic duties, such as giving out employee awards.
10) In their interpersonal role, managers act as the nerve centres of their organizations, receiving the most concrete, up-to-date information and redistributing it to those who need to be aware of it.
11) In their informational role, managers act as entrepreneurs by initiating new kinds of activities; they handle disturbances arising in the organization; they allocate resources to staff members who need them; and they negotiate conflicts and mediate between conflicting groups.
12) High-quality decisions require high-quality information.