A dual-motive heuristic for member information initiation in group decision making: Managing risk and commitment

Abstract Information exchange in the decision making of interactive groups is examined at the level of individual group members. I recognize the dual or competing motives of members who act as both individuals and group members, and propose a two-stage heuristic for decisions on the type and amount of information they initiate. At the first stage, individual members intuit or solve the problem of maintaining their status in the group through information initiations that minimize the probability of receiving negative evaluations weighted by the sender's status. In the second stage, the member accepts some increment to this minimum to contribute to group decision quality. The increment the member accepts is proportional to his or her status and is the basis for the initiation of ideas and negative evaluations. The explicit forms that are proposed for the solution of the two-stage problem allow the quality-maximizing probability of an idea to be expressed in terms of a member's status. This result is used to examine a conjecture on status distributions and the probability of idea initiations that maximize the quality of a group decision. Initial evidence from recent studies that supports assumptions of this work is presented, and the capability of procedures in computer-mediated information exchange to maintain the exchange of ideas and negative evaluations at quality maximizing rates is noted.