You are the manager or person in charge. Identify the preferred level of employee involvement from one of the five levels described below. For each scenario, identify and justify what factors led you to choose this level of employee involvement rather than the others.

Decide alone. Use your personal knowledge and insight to complete the entire decision process without conferring with anyone else.

Receive information from individuals. Ask specific individuals for information. They do not make recommendations and might not even know what the problem is about.

Consult with individuals. Describe the problem to selected individuals and seek both their information and recommendations. The final decision is made by you, and you may or may not take the advice from others into account.

Consult with the team. You bring together a team of people (all department staff or a representation of them if the department is large), who are told about the problem and provide their ideas and recommendations. You make the final decision, which may or may not reflect the team's information.

Facilitate the team's decision. The entire decision-making process is handed over to a team or committee of subordinates. You serve only as a facilitator to guide the decision process and keep everyone on track. The team identifies the problem, discovers alternative solutions, chooses the best alternative, and implements their choice.

3) SCENARIO 3: COAST GUARD CUTTER DECISION

You are the captain of a 200-foot Coast Guard cutter, with a crew of 16, including officers. Your mission is general at-sea search and rescue. At 2:00 a.m. today, while on route to your home port after a routine 28-day patrol, you received word from the nearest Coast Guard station that a small plane had crashed 60 miles offshore. You obtained all the available information concerning the location of the crash, informed your crew of the mission, and set a new course at maximum speed for the scene to commence a search for survivors and wreckage.

You have now been searching for 20 hours. Your search operation has been increasingly impaired by rough seas, and there is evidence of a severe storm building. The atmospherics associated with the deteriorating weather have made communications with the Coast Guard station impossible. A decision must be made shortly about whether to abandon the search and place your vessel on a course that would ride out the storm (thereby protecting the vessel and your crew, but relegating any possible survivors to almost certain death from exposure) or to continue a potentially futile search and the risks it would entail.

Before losing communications, you received an update weather advisory concerning the severity and duration of the storm. Although your crew members are extremely conscientious about their responsibility, you believe that they would be divided on the decision of leaving or staying.