Scholarly record

BUILDING BLOCKS OF DECISION-MAKING: PERCEIVED QUALITY OF ORGANISATIONAL DECISION-MAKING BY KNOWLEDGE WORKERS IN FINNISH ORGANISATIONS

M. Kooskora, E. Reittila

Abstract

In a knowledge-intensive economy, the ability of the individual knowledge worker to produce high quality decisions is perhaps one of the most valuable assets organisations today has and organisations are increasingly concerned with ways of making better decisions, because an organisation’s ability to make high quality decisions is of utmost importance for its success. Consequently, a knowledge worker’s primary deliverable is a good decision, which emphasises their essential role in producing high quality decisions at all levels of organisations. Given the importance of decision quality especially for organisations employing knowledge workers, the purpose of our study is to find out what contributes to the high level of decision quality perceived by knowledge workers. In order to address the research objective and fill in a gap in current research, two research questions were set: 1) Which decision quality building blocks are considered of high quality by knowledge workers? 2) Does the perception on decision quality by knowledge workers at high managerial level differ from perceptions of those working as experts or middle-level managers? The research subject was structured and the collected research data was analysed against three main elements that define organisational decision quality, the ethics and values, decision-making process and outcome, and organisational culture, labeled as building blocks of decision quality. The research data was collected in cooperation with a decision technology company Fingertip via an online questionnaire amongst knowledge workers representing different types of organisations operating in Finland. Altogether 98 valid responses were received and analysed with the help descriptive statistics, cross- tabulations and nonparametric (significance) testing. The results showed that knowledge workers perceive the quality of decisions in their organisations generally being quite high on all three observed building blocks of decision quality. There are however differences between perceptions of knowledge workers belonging to higher management in their organisations and those belonging to middle management or working at expert level: it seems according to the results that the perception of organisational decision quality is dependent (biased) on the respondent’s level in his/her organisation.

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