This article presents Second Messenger, a system of dynamic awareness displays that reveal speaker participation patterns in a face-to-face discussion. The system has been used by a variety of groups during face-to-face meetings, increasing individuals ’ awareness of their own and others ’ participation in discussions. Experimental results indicate that these displays influence the amount an individual participates in a discussion and the process of information sharing used during a decision-making task. These findings suggest that awareness applications bring about systematic changes in group communication styles, highlighting the potential for such applications to be designed to improve group interactions. Joan DiMicco is an HCI researcher interested in human–human communication; she is a researcher at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. Katherine Hollenbach is an undergraduate at MIT with an interest in computer science and design; she is an undergraduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab. Anna

SUMMARY—Teams of people working together for a common purpose have been a centerpiece of human social organization ever since our ancient ancestors first banded together to hunt game, raise families, and defend their communities. Human history is largely a story of people working together in groups to explore, achieve, and conquer. Yet, the modern concept of work in large organizations that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is largely a tale of work as a collection of individual jobs. A variety of global forces unfolding over the last two decades, however, has pushed organizations worldwide to restructure work around teams, to enable more rapid, flexible, and adaptive responses to the unexpected. This shift in the structure of work has made team effectiveness a salient organizational concern. Teams touch our lives everyday and their effectiveness is important to well-being across a wide range of societal functions. There is over 50 years of psychological research—literally thousands of studies—focused on understanding and influencing the processes that underlie team effectiveness. Our goal in this monograph is to sift through this voluminous literature to identify what we know, what we think we know, and what we need to know to improve the effectiveness of work groups and teams. We begin by defining team effectiveness and establishing the conceptual underpinnings of our approach to understanding it. We then turn to our review, which concentrates primarily on topics that have well-developed theoretical and empirical foundations, to ensure that our conclusions and recommendations are on firm footing. Our review begins by focusing on cognitive, motivational/affective, and behavioral team processes—processes that enable team members to combine their resources to resolve task demands and, in so doing, be effective. We then turn our attention to identifying interventions, or ‘‘levers,’ ’ that can shape or align team processes and thereby provide tools

Abstract not found

The present paper tries to overcome the dualism of group-level vs. individualistic analysis of small group processes, by presenting a model of social identity formation that incorporates factors at both levels of analysis as well as their interaction. On the basis of prior theorising in the social identity tradition and a programme of research spanning several interactive group research paradigms, we suggest that within small groups a social identity can operate as a contextual given, which shapes the behaviour of individuals within the group, as much as the behaviour of individuals within the group can shape social identity. This proposal is supported by a programme of research into social influence within small interactive groups. This research explores deductive (top-down) processes through which existing identities influence group processes, but also shows a reciprocal influence through which intragroup discussion creates a sense of group identity in the apparent absence of any direct intergroup comparison (an inductive, or bottom-up, path). It is the interaction between these two forces that we believe is characteristic of the way in which small groups achieve a sense of social identity. Supporting this view, we describe research that suggests that processes of identity formation play a key role in decision making, productive collaboration, consensualisation, integrative negotiations, and the development of shared cognition. Under certain given circumstances [...] an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes.

Observations of group decision at the frontier of human experience promise insights into how human collectives anticipate and respond to highly non-routine events. In the case of decision making by emergency response organizations, prior experience is expected to be relevant, despite the sometimes considerable difference between those experiences and the emergency situation at hand (Earley 1985;

Recent research has argued forcefully and persuasively that to understand creative thinking it is necessary to investigate both convergent and divergent thinking processes. In the context of group decision making in emergency response, the link between these processes is particularly relevant, since stakes are high and, by definition, thinking must conclude with decision. This study investigates convergent and divergent thinking processes in the context of group decision making during the response to two simulated emergency events. The results suggest that level of event severity had little appreciable effect on these processes in one group’s response to two non-routine simulated emergencies.

The average estimates of a group of individuals are generally better than the estimates of the individuals alone, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the wisdom of crowds. This has been shown to work for many types of simple tasks, but has generally been performed on subjects that do not communicate with one another. We report group aggregation performance for more complex tasks, involving reconstructing the order of time-based and magnitude-based series of items from memory. In half of these tasks, subjects receive the previous subject’s final ordering in a serial fashion. The aggregate for communicating subjects is better than that for independent subjects. We introduce a Bayesian version of a Thurstonian model to show how each subject combines their individual, private knowledge with the previous individual’s ordering. The model also shows that individuals can produce estimates in the shared information condition that are better for aggregating than independent estimates.

What causes top management teams to make poor strategic decisions?

Abstract not found

Most research on decision making has focused on how human or animal decision makers choose between two or more options, posed in advance by the researchers. The mechanisms by which options are generated for most decisions, however, are not well understood. Models of sequential search have examined the trade-off between continued exploration and choosing one’s current best option, but still cannot explain the processes by which new options are generated. We argue that understanding the origins of options is a crucial but untapped area for decision making research. We explore a number of factors which influence the generation of options, which fall broadly into two categories: psycho-biological and socio-cultural. The former category includes factors such as perceptual biases and associative memory networks. The latter category relies on the incredible human capacity for culture and social learning, which doubtless shape not only our choices but the options available for choice. Our intention is to start a discussion that brings us closer toward understanding the origins of options.