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William C. Coscarelli teaches fulltime at Southern Illinois University Carbondale in the department of Curriculum & Instruction. He is the former co–director of the Hewlett–Packard World Wide Test Development Center. He was elected as president of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology Division for Instructional Development, appointed as founding editor of Performance Improvement Quarterly, and was elected as the president of the ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement).

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The Decision-Making Style Inventory

Your decision making describes how you seek, organize, and weigh information. Research has proved that people who succeed are able to identify and adapt their decision-making styles as new tasks demand.

The Decision-Making Inventory Participant's Workbook is used in conjunction with the DMSI. The Decision-Making Inventory is a validated and reliable 20-item assessment that identifies your preferred decision-making style on a two dimensional scale?two structural styles?Systematic and Spontaneous, and two processing styles?Internal and External. The Systematic decision-maker prefers logical processes and seeks to analyze all parts in a problem. Spontaneous decision makers prefer thought-chaining and tend to focus on the whole, not the parts.

The Participant's Workbook offers advice on how your preferred style is most and least effective, how to communicate successfully with other styles, and practical suggestions for developing style flexibility.

Praise for The Decision?Making Inventory

"I have followed the development of the DMSI since its inception 20 years ago. It is a valid, interesting, and easy to use inventory for anyone wishing to find a common corporate language for understanding individual differences."
?Constance Holmes, Director, supply chain optimization training and development, Coca Cola

"The DMSI provides a unique and easily understood approach for managing decision-making styles that works for both individuals and organizations."
?Ingrid Bens, Author, Facilitating with Ease! and Advanced Facilitation Strategies

"We used the DMSI in a college career exploration course designed for students who were undecided or changing their majors. The DMSI was an exceptional tool that helped students understand the important role that decision-making style plays in the process of making realistic career choices."
?Melinda McDonald, Associate Director, FisherCollege of Business, The Ohio State University and George Steele, director of educational access,The Ohio Learning Network

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Decison-Making Style Inventory, Participant's Workbook

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

There is a continuing quest to understand how we interact in the world. On a day-to-day basis, this quest may begin with personal musings about how we as individuals make our way in the world, how we interact with our significant others, and finally, how we can accomplish the tasks we need to accomplish in our professional lives. Deciding what we must do next is increasingly a fundamental issue for each of us-and how we decide will affect the quality of our lives and our work.

Thus, the area of individual differences in human behavior is one of the most fascinating and long-studied areas of research. Depending on how we define an individual difference, it can be as broad as Freud's notion of human behavior or as discrete as a single way of viewing figure, as with the studies in field dependence and independence. However, somewhere along this continuum is a point at which an individual difference is particularly relevant to learning and human interaction. This point, or perhaps more accurately, this region, has been variously characterized as "cognitive style," "learning style," or "decision-making style." While there are important differences in how people view these characterizations, they reflect an underlying sense that each individual has a preferred way of gathering, organizing, and processing information. Understanding these individual differences is important when it comes to understanding oneself as well as the styles of others. Further, this understanding becomes very important in any interpersonal relationship, private or professional, that must be attended to, nurtured, or managed.

It was against this background that Richard Johnson, who completed his doctorate at the University of Missouri and was working as the director of the Career Counseling Center at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, first proposed his theory of decision-making styles. Based on hundreds of interviews with people trying to choose a career, Rich found that people employed two approaches to gathering information and then two approaches to analyzing this information. He identified four decision-making styles that are more specific than most theories of learning styles, yet not so broad as theories of personality. In filling this middle ground, Johnson proposed an easily understood, unique, and generally applicable theory of individual differences that has proven valuable in dealing with others. Rich had begun to create a self-report inventory to assess these styles when he passed away. I had begun to work with Rich and have continued the development and refinement of the Decision-Making Style Inventory (DMSI) since his death.

The DMSI is an important contribution to the world of decision making, as studies have come to show that successful decision making requires flexibility in style.

The Decision-Making Style Inventory is a self-report inventory designed to help individuals understand themselves and those around them, for example, the ability to identify one's own style and the style of a co-worker, and then to articulate those differences and respect one another's decision-making styles, can help us to avoid tension and allow us to work together more effectively.

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Excerpted from Decison-Making Style Inventory, Participant's Workbookby William Coscarelli DaJean Johnson Copyright © 2007 by William Coscarelli. Excerpted by permission.
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