Decision Making Stages
Developed by B. Aubrey Fisher, there are four stages that should be involved in all group decision making. These stages, or sometimes called phases, are important for the decision making process to begin
Orientation stage – This phase is where members meet for the first time and start to get to know each other.
Conflict stage – Once group members become familiar with each other, disputes, little fights and arguments occur. Group members eventually work it out.
Emergence stage – The group begins to clear up vague opinions by talking about them.
Reinforcement stage – Members finally make a decision, while justifying themselves that it was the right decision.
It is said that critical norms in a group improves the quality of decisions, while the majority of opinions (called consensus norms) do not. This is due to collaboration between one another, and when group members get used to, and familiar with, each other, they will tend to argue and create more of a dispute to agree upon one decision. This does not mean that all group members fully agree — they may not want argue further just to be liked by other group members or to "fit in".
Read more about this topic: Decision Making
Famous quotes containing the words decision, making and/or stages:
“I know my fate. One day my name will be tied to the memory of something monstrous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision invoked against everything that had previously been believed, demanded, sanctified. I am no man, I am dynamite!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“However, the danger in [socially unbalanced relationships] is that the subjection of the woman temporarily calms the man’s jealousy but also renders it more demanding. He ends up making his mistress live like those prisoners on whom light is shone day and night in order for them to be better watched. And things always end in tragedy.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)