Good are you at saying no research indicates that we

good are you at saying no? Research indicates that we perceive that saying no is uncomfortable, and
often after saying no we will feel obligated to say yes to subsequent requests. In fact, people are so
uncomfortable saying no that they may agree to unethical acts. When student participants in a study
asked 108 strangers to write “pickle” in library books, half of them did it!19
Decision Making in Organizations
Business schools train students to follow rational decision-making models. While such rationalistic
models have merit, they don’t always describe how people make decisions. OB improves the way we
make decisions in organizations by addressing the decision-making errors people commit in addition to
the perception errors we’ve discussed. First, we describe some decision-making constructs, and then
outline a few of the most common errors.
The Rational Model, Bounded Rationality, and Intuition

In OB, there are generally accepted constructs of decision making each of us employs to make
determinations: rational decision making, bounded rationality, and intuition. Though their processes
make sense, they may not lead to the most accurate (or best) decisions. More importantly, there are
times when one strategy may lead to a better outcome than another in a given situation.
Rational Decision Making
We often think the best decision maker is rational and makes consistent, value-maximizing choices
within specified constraints.20 Rational decisions follow a six-step rational decision-making model21 (see
Exhibit 6-2).
An exhibit shows five steps in the rational decision-making model.
Exhibit 6-2
Steps in the Rational Decision-Making Model
Figure 6-2 Full Alternative Text
Rational
Characterized by making consistent, value-maximizing choices within specified constraints.
Rational decision-making model
A decision-making model that describes how individuals should behave in order to maximize some
outcome.
The rational decision-making model assumes the decision maker has complete information, is able to
identify all relevant options in an unbiased manner, and chooses the option with the highest utility.22 In
reality, though, most decisions don’t follow the rational model; people are usually content to find an
acceptable or reasonable solution to a problem rather than an optimal one. We tend to limit our choices
to the neighborhood of the problem’s symptom and the current alternative at hand. As one expert in
decision making put it, “Most significant decisions are made by judgment, rather than by a defined
prescriptive model.”23 People are remarkably unaware of making suboptimal decisions.24
Bounded Rationality
Often, we don’t follow the rational decision-making model for a reason: Our limited information-
processing capability makes it impossible to assimilate all the information necessary to optimize, even if
the information is readily obtainable.25 Because we cannot formulate and solve complex problems with

full rationality, we operate within the confines of bounded rationality. We construct simplified models