Increasing Creatvity in Business Decision Making

In rational decision making, how much creativity is acceptable for an organization? Common sense also dictates that too much creativity in decision making is to be avoided since the ultimate goal is provide benefit, not harm.

Decision making is a reaction to an initial problem that has come to the attention of the proper personnel and that person then examines it for needed action. As a standard; decisions are made in business environments using pre-defined models like: defining the problem in a constrained format, outlining specific criteria of the object, determining the values of all these criteria, giving due consideration to all reasonable alternatives, then evaluating the alternatives and making a final selection as a decision. It has been said that the higher the level of experience; the greater the creativity skills, coupled with an increased level of motivation will then produce an increase in creativity in decision making (Robbins & Judge, 2007; Rodriguez, 2007).

Hughes (2003) notes that "research has shown everyone has some creativity".He specifies that "systematic courses of instruction in applied imagination produce significant gains in personality traits such as confidence, self-reliance, persuasiveness, initiative, and leadership" this leading to a positive gain for the employee and the company. He feels that corporations should look for employee's that have "higher than average scores in areas of mental/emotional health" and feels confident that the studies he has reviewed are accurate when he links those numbers to "higher than average scores in creative thinking"(Hughes, 2003).