Group Decision-Making Quality and Performance

Advantages and Disadvantages of Group Decision Making

The belief that several heads are better than one underlies the reliance on groups to make important decisions in business, military, medical, and governmental contexts. Groups, as opposed to individuals, represent a diversity of perspectives, areas of expertise, and values. In addition, groups can distribute the responsibility for consequential decisions across many members. Furthermore, people may reject decisions made by a single authority, whereas collective decision making may increase the acceptability and ease of implementation of decisions.

Despite these advantages, however, group decision making also suffers from significant limitations. For example, groups often take longer to arrive at a choice than individuals. In addition, although group decision making is expected to lead to superior performance when no single member has all the necessary information to identify a correct solution, extensive laboratory research has revealed that groups tend to discuss information that is shared by all members as opposed to pooling the unique information held by individual members. Therefore, the potential for different individuals to bring independent, unshared, and valid information to the group is never realized, which contributes to incorrect group solutions. Nevertheless, information sharing has been found to improve over time, and leadership as well as training can improve the dissemination of knowledge in teams.

Although groups are often expected to neutralize individual biases in decision making, they have been found to fall prey to some of the same errors as individuals. The question of whether groups are any less subject to judgmental biases than individuals depends on a variety of factors, including group size and the type and magnitude of bias, as well as group processes.

Some research has found that groups exaggerate the biases of individual group members. Specifically, group polarization refers to the finding that groups are more extreme than the mean of individuals. For example, if members adopt a cautious or risky viewpoint prior to group discussion, they tend to have an even more cautious or risky viewpoint after deciding together as a group.

Another disadvantage to group decision making is the potential for groupthink, which has received much emphasis in the literature. Groupthink occurs when the premature striving for agreement among members produces faulty decisions. To combat these limitations and improve group decision making, many techniques have been proposed to establish new patterns of social interaction, change the sequence of steps in information processing, or develop specific procedures for task accomplishment.

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