Decision Making

"Decision making is the cognitive process of selecting a course of action from among multiple alternatives. Every decision-making produces a final choice. It can be an action or an opinion. It begins when we need to do something but we do not know what. Therefore decision-making is a reasoning process which can be rational or irrational, and can be based on explicit assumptions or tacit assumptions"( wikepedia.org). This is something that is used every day, by everyone to make decisions. There are tools that help us make decisions and one of those tools is a decision making model. A decision making model is an effective tool that has a number of steps that you would follow that allows you to make the most informative decision possible. There are many different models that are used with each having numerous amounts of steps. The one I chose is a six step model from ethics.org. It has ethical considerations intertwined within it but can be used for many other types of decisions.

There are six steps to this model; defining the problem, identifying the alternatives, evaluating the alternatives, making the decision, implementing the decision, and evaluating the decision. Unbeknownst to me, I followed a model like then when I had to make a critical decision at my previous employer.

The problem I had and the decision I had to make was profound and it could have and did change my career forever. The problem was this: I was being sexually harassed by an off duty police officer that the company I worked hired for security purposes. On many occasions, this officer had made inappropriate comments to me. At first, I overlooked the comments and I was transferred to another store and thought my problem had been solved for me. I was wrong.

While I was at the new store, everything was great for a few months. However, he eventually came to work at the same store I was at. Nothing was said at first. However, the harassment started again. I was a general manager of this store at the time and really loved my job and all the challenges that came along with it. So, I knew that I must make a decision on how to handle the harassment and what to do about it.

The first step of the decision model is to identify the problem. For me, the problem was simple. The officer had no right to sexually harass me and something had to be done. I also knew that if I allowed it to continue, it could lead to worse problems for myself and possibly other woman that I worked with and for whom I was responsible.

The second and third step of this particular model coincide with each other. They are identifying the alternatives and then evaluating the alternatives. This means laying out all the possible solutions and outcomes. This was time consuming for me because there were many options available to me with many dfferent outcomes. I could have left it alone, but to me that was not an option. The next option I had was talking to the officer personally and see if that would stop the harassment. However, I did not feel that this was a good option because we would have to be alone and I didn't think he would stop with me just asking him to. The third option was go to my supervisor. This