Group Decision Making

1.   Strengths of group decision-making:

• Groups generate more complete information and knowledge.
• They offer increased diversity of views.
• This opens up the opportunity for more approaches and alternatives to be considered.
• The evidence indicates that a group will almost always outperform even the best individual.
• Groups lead to increased acceptance of a solution.

2.   Weaknesses of group decision-making:

• They are time consuming.
• There is conformity pressures in groups.
• Group discussion can be dominated by one or a few members.
• Group decisions suffer from ambiguous responsibility.

3.   Effectiveness and efficiency:

• Whether groups are more effective than individuals depends on the criteria you use.
• In terms of accuracy, group decisions will tend to be more accurate.
• On the average, groups make better-quality decisions than individuals.
• If decision effectiveness is defined in terms of speed, individuals are superior.
• If creativity is important, groups tend to be more effective than individuals.
• If effectiveness means the degree of acceptance the final solution achieves, groups are better.

4.   In terms of efficiency, groups almost always stack up as a poor second to the individual decision maker. The exceptions tend to be those instances where, to achieve comparable quantities of diverse input, the single decision maker must spend a great deal of time reviewing files and talking to people.

5.   Summary:

• Groups offer an excellent vehicle for performing many of the steps in the decision-making process.
• They are a source of both breadth and depth of input for information gathering.
• When the final solution is agreed upon, there are more people in a group decision to support and implement it.