Consensus Versus Devil's Advocacy: The Influence of Decision Process and Task Structure on Strategic Decision Making

This study compares decision processes of consensus and devil's advocacy within an additive task, a disjunctive task, and a conjunctive task structure. The results suggest that high-conflict decision processes such as devil's advocacy enhances decision making in disjunctive tasks, retards decision making in additive tasks, but has no effect on decision making in conjunctive tasks. Perceptions of the group's atmosphere were most positive within consensus groups.

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