Strategy Formation and Problem Solving

"In reality organisational decision making is characterised by two opposing tendencies. On the one hand, inherent conflicts between factions, departments, units and levels and individuals over scarce resources breed conflict, opposition, careerism, negotiation, compromise. Thus conflict and competition may adversely affect problem solving and strategy formation. On the other hand, decision making may be affected not by difference and disagreement but by consensus and similarity - by the fact that decision makers share the same cognitive frames of reference and do not realise that they share these cognitive schema." Mabey et. al. (1998, p. 510).
Mabey, et. al. (1998), present a dualist view of organisational decision making which, they claim can be described in diametrically opposed dimensions of pluralist, self-serving, politicking and unitarily, group-serving, cognitive schematics. In isolation, this position appears to be a reasonable one, incorporating components of several management theories found in management literature, but like all management theories it is limited in its universal application to organisational decision making.…