Automating Guidance and Response for Group Decision-Making

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Current advances in computer and information technologies suggest a growing opportunity to combine automated systems and other management arrangements such as self-managed groups and teams. This project explores the possibilities of constructing an automated computerized group decision support system (GDSS) to help groups manage their decision-making processes more effectively. Ideally such a system would provide guidance for a group, diagnose problems and opportunities and have response and intervention capabilities. Current theory and research provide a body of rules and findings, but no integrative framework or model to underpin such an effort. This study develops a formal representation of group decision-making processes. Using this representation, the project identifies cues which discriminate between effective and ineffective decision-making processes for different types of decision tasks. The study also addresses the impacts of GDSS guidance and response on group decision making and its comparative advantages to facilitation or other "human" forms of guidance. Data to develop and test the model come from laboratory experiments and a large set of recorded team meetings from two organizations. An obvious extension of this effort is a prototype GDSS; however, the more immediate contribution of the project is basic knowledge about group decision making using an inclusive theory of group processes which emphasizes key content and process variables and their interrelations.