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Public Sector Decision Making

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Decision Making in the Public Sector

Power and decision-making go hand-in-hand. This is because, as our text points out, power determines who gets to decide. As there are countless strategies and structures in the power and command structure throughout organizations, so goes the multitude of decision-making models offered to those in the power to make decisions. While alike the private sector, decisions before public sector decision-makers require them to make the most appropriate decision in front of them, they uniquely have a higher demand for accountability and efficiency. The decisions to be made in the public sector generally are more complex, dynamic, and prone to interruption than their private sector counterparts. In an attempt to follow a standardized and consistent process in making decisions, public organizations follow formulated processes of making decisions. In this composition, I will offer a number of the models that can be found in utilization today when having to make a decision for a public entity.

The principal backbone of making a decision is rational. When making a decision that would not question your “competence, ethics or sanity”, as the book points out, would be to use simple rational. The classic rational decision making model is focused on that the decision being made is the best one being made. Strictly rational decision making involves components including; the decision maker knows all the relevant goals, decision makers clearly know the values used in assessing those goals, decision makers examine all alternative means for achieving the goals, and the decision makers chose the most efficient of the alternative means for maximizing the goals. However these conditions are rarely met due to the complexity of many situations. Only on the most simple of decisions can this method be used. An example of this would be if a police chief

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