Category: Optional,
Test Date: 25 Jul 2024
Model Answer
Approach:
- Highlight Simon’s views on influence and how it impacts Decision Making.
The Mechanism of Influence
- Simon maintains that people in an organisation are decision-making mechanisms, and administrators influence them by determining the factual or value premises on which decisions are based.
- The first decision that an employee participant makes is whether to participate or not in an organisation.
- Herbert Simon also differentiates between the decision to participate and decision to produce. In deciding to participate, a participant is guided by personal considerations and once this decision is made, personal goals, to some degree, become subordinate to the goals of the organisation. High morale develops whenever influence creates such an atmosphere in which employees are willing to participate in a timely active way and are ready to devote their full energies to the tasks of the organisation.
- Herbert Simon also distinguishes between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ influences on a decision-maker–. Internal influence identifies the individual with the organisation, although this identification is limited by an individual’s background and outside influences. The other is external influence. In this category comes authority which Herbert Simon defines as the power to make a decisions which guide the actions of others. Thus, authority is a relationship existing between two individuals. It involves behaviour on the part of both the superior and the subordinate.
- This shows that authority is neither legalistic in a strict sense nor is it based on formal sanctions alone. Essentially, authority is based on the willingness of the receiver of a command to achieve the purpose of the organisation, or to follow a leader, or to follow the social sanctions imposed by the group to which he belongs.
- Herbert Simon also warns against the conflicting influences because in administration, they pace an important problem and these problems can only be solved by establishing determinate hierarchy of authority,
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