Team Decision Making

Why Use Groups?

• Decision Quality
• Groups or teams should make higher-quality decisions than
individuals.
• Decision Acceptance and Commitment
• A group decision will be more acceptable to those involved.
• This is especially important in getting a decision implemented.
• Diffusion of Responsibility
• The ability of group members to share the burden of the negative
consequences of a poor decision.
Do Groups Actually Make Higher-Quality
Decisions?
• Is the frequent use of groups to make decisions warranted by
evidence?
• Groups should perform better than individuals when:
• the group members differ in relevant skills and abilities, as
long as they do not differ so much that conflict occurs;
• some division of labour can occur;
• memory for facts is an important issue
Team Decision Making Constraints
• Time constraints
• Takes longer than individual decision making
• Time to organize/coordinate/ maintain relationship
• Hidden Profile
• Sharing similar information
• Domination
• When meetings are dominated by a single individual or a small
coalition.
Team Decision Making Constraints (con’t)

• Evaluation apprehension
• Belief that others are silently evaluating you
• Peer pressure to conform
• Suppressing opinions that oppose team norms
• Groupthink
• Tendency in highly cohesive teams to value
consensus at the price of decision quality
• It describes situations in which group pressures for
conformity deter the group from critically
appraising unusual, minority, or unpopular views.
Groups and Risk
• A risky shift is the tendency for groups to make riskier
decisions than the average risk initially advocated by
their individual members.
• A conservative shift is the tendency for groups to
make less risky decisions than the average risk initially
advocated by their individual members.
The Dynamics of Risky and Conservative
Shifts for Two Groups
General Guidelines for Team Decisions

• Team norms should encourage critical thinking

• Sufficient team diversity
• Ensure neither leader nor any member dominates
• Maintain optimal team size
• Introduce effective team structures (constructive conflict)
• Devil advocates
• Brainstorming
• Delphi technique
Decide when to use
individuals instead of teams
• When not to use teams…Ask:
• Can the work be done better by one person?
• Does the work create a common goal or purpose?
• Are the members of the group interdependent?
 Implications for Managers

• Norms control behavior by establishing standards of

right and wrong.
• The norms of a given group can help explain
members’ behaviors for managers.
• When norms support high output, managers can
expect markedly higher individual performance than
when they aim to restrict output.
• Norms that support antisocial behavior increase the
likelihood that individuals will engage in deviant
workplace activities.
Implications for Managers

• The impact of size on a group’s performance

depends on the type of task.
• Larger groups are more effective at fact-finding
activities, smaller groups at action-taking
tasks.
• Our knowledge of social loafing suggests that
managers using larger groups should also
provide measures of individual performance.
 Implications for Managers

• The group size–satisfaction relationship is what

we would intuitively expect:
• Larger groups are associated with lower
satisfaction.
• As size increases, opportunities for
participation and social interaction decrease.
• Having more members also prompts
dissension, conflict, and the formation of
subgroups.
 Implications for Managers

• Cohesiveness can influence a group’s level of

productivity or not, depending on the group’s
performance-related norms.
• Diversity appears to have a mixed impact on group
performance, with some studies suggesting that
diversity can help performance and others
suggesting it can hurt it.
 Implications for Managers
• Effective teams have common characteristics.
• They have adequate resources, effective leadership, a climate of
trust, and a performance evaluation and reward system that
reflects team contributions.
• These teams have individuals with technical expertise as well as
problem-solving, decision-making, and interpersonal skills and
the right traits, especially conscientiousness and openness.
Summary and Next Week

• What are virtual teams?

• What are the advantages of having them?