Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Types of Audience Decisions 91

Audience Decisions About Organizational Policies

Audience members, acting as policy makers, make policy decisions when they decide whether to

adopt a new policy—a new rule, regulation, or set of criteria for making a decision or evaluating

behavior within an organization.^120 University policy committees make policy decisions when they

decide on new criteria that professors must meet for promotion. Employers make policy decisions

when they decide on new rules and regulations to add to their employee handbooks. State legisla-

tors make policy decisions when they decide on new laws citizens must abide by. U.S. presidents

make policy decisions when they decide whether to sign or veto a piece of legislation.

Policy decisions are nonroutine decisions, out of the ordinary. Yet they are the type of decisions

that world leaders, legislators, and CEOs must make every day. The need for a policy decision can

arise any time a group or organization experiences a question or controversy about what policy

or rules to follow. Should we sell guns in our stores? Should our fi rm do business in countries that

abuse human rights? Should our nation cap carbon emissions? Should we ever launch a preemptive

attack on another country?

Because policy decisions are nonroutine, the group or organization will likely have no shared

schemata for making them. Thus, professionals who seek policy decisions from others must often

develop a set of decision criteria for addressing the issue and convince their audience to accept their

criteria before they can successfully argue for the policy option they prefer.^121 Once agreement on

the decision criteria has been reached, a new policy can be chosen.

The Infl uence of Group Affi liations on Policy Decisions

Policy decisions are often made by committees or by a leader who has asked for advice from subor-

dinates or consultants.^122 When policy decisions are made by committees, the committee members

act both as communicators and as the audience. As communicators, committee members make

arguments for or against alternative policies in order to garner support for the policy they prefer.

As audience members, they act as policy makers who decide which of the proposed policies is best.

Unlike other types of decisions that rely primarily on audience decision-making expertise,

the departmental affi liations and special interests of audience members often have a signifi -

cant impact on the decision criteria they use to make policy decisions.^123 The membership of a

policy-making group often mirrors the structure of the organization to which the group belongs,

with each member arguing for the decision criteria and proposals that promote the interests and

views of his or her own department.^124 If a department or other stakeholder in the decision has

no representative in the group, the policy alternative they would have recommended and the deci-

sion criteria they would have used to evaluate alternative proposals will likely be overlooked.^125

Thus, organization leaders are able to exert a great deal of infl uence over policy decisions simply by

deciding which departments should or should not be represented at a particular policy meeting.^126

Table 2.7 categorizes the statements made by Dutch cabinet members as they met to decide

their government’s policy about Indonesia’s bid for independence in 1948.^127 The numbers in the

table indicate the percentage of statements made by each Dutch minister that related to one of the

six types of decision criteria discussed in the meeting. The table illustrates that the types of decision

criteria the group used to make its decision refl ected the departmental affi liations of the ministers

present. The percentages in bold show that each departmental minister’s focus was on the decision

criteria most relevant to his own department. Had the Minister of Justice been included in the

meeting, we would expect to see more discussion of legal or law-related decision criteria. The table

also shows that the prime minister, whose power depended on domestic politics, was the group

member most focused on decision criteria related to domestic politics.