Dysfunctional Management Teams: Focus on Programmed Decisions

Programmed decisions are routine, recurring decisions about well understood situations where a precise set of procedures and policies have been developed to deal with their occurrence (Gibson, Ivancevich, & Donnelly, 1994). For example, shipping and installing products at a customer’s site can be handled by a programmed decision. Nonprogrammed decisions are nonroutine, possibly unique and complex, decisions where the situations do not occur frequently enough for procedures and policies to have been developed. For example, defining the market requirements and developing a new product line cannot be handled by a programmed decision making process. Procedures for making programmed decisions can be developed for almost any recurring business issue and the organization can be trained to cope with their occurrence. Methodologies exist for identifying unique problems and developing complex solutions, but there is nothing routine about the process.

There are a number of implications to how an organization handles programmed and nonprogrammed decisions, if programmed decisions can be thought of as often being tactical and nonprogrammed decisions as strategic. The executive team should be delegating decisions that can be programmed to their direct reports and their respective organizations. If the executive team is spending more time on programmed decisions than on nonprogrammed decisions, this could be indicative of a dysfunctional management team. By its very nature, the executive team should be spending more time on strategic issues and planning than on handling tactical recurring issues.

Reference

Gibson, J.L., Ivancevich, J.M., & Donnelly, J.H., Jr. (1994). Organizations: Behavior, structure, processes (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Irwin.