ESSAY: Impacts

“If the people who make the decisions are the people who will also bear the consequences of those decisions, perhaps better decisions will result.”
John Abrams, The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community and Place

We have all suffered the effects of poor decision-making by a boss. Often the bad decision was made in haste or without regard to the impact it would have on those who had to live with the decision.

What is one of the worst decisions you have had to deal with in the work environment? What was the short term impact? What was the long term impact?

ANSWER

Impacts of Poor Decision-making

            Employees often seem to make mistakes; whether it is failing to document something important, tagging the wrong person when sending an email, or making a legal mistake that could potentially and significantly cost the company. In the workplace, employees seem to be one action away from making a mistake. Virtually every workplace is characterized by individuals and groups involved in decision-making (Ceschi et al., 2017), whether good or bad. I am no exception when it comes to making bad decisions. There was a time I made one of the worst decisions whose implications were sound. I remember making a decision, on behalf of the business, to invest in one of our main rival companies. It involved buying their assets, which included obtaining their domain name and consumer information/data. This was…

The short-term impact was that the business struggled to generate revenue and profits. This is because we depended on the rival consumer data, and the domain name to facilitate various business operations. We did not realize that the consumer data and the domain name was a synonym to failure from the beginning, as customers did not embrace the brand and the operational nature of the business, as cautioned by Ceschi et al. (2017). A decision was made to relocate the business operations to a new location to attract new customers and generate profits, as well as reducing the costs of operation. Unfortunately, the decision to relocate resulted in a long-term impact on the business. For instance, the location had higher costs of living, which means the employees demanded a pay rise, which in turn, led to an increase in the …

References

Ceschi, A., Demerouti, E., Sartori, R., & Weller, J. (2017). Decision-making processes in the workplace: How exhaustion, lack of resources and job demands impair them and affect performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 8(313). doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00313