Group decision making: friend or foe?

Recognized as essential to modern business, collaborative meetings are held to make decisions about product design, market definition, employee hiring, and many other factors that affect business operations. Based on the literature on group decision-making (a single collaboratively assigned selection from an array of choices), several hypothesis have been generated for further research based on three fundamental problems with group decision-making: impact of initial preference and time pressure, impact of group dynamics and politics, and the lack of an objective quantitative group preference. We suggest that group decision making should not be utilized unless there are objective criteria (i.e., money, time) that allow the group members to evaluate decision choices for determination of group preferences. Without these objective criteria, the use of group decision-making should be reserved for use in option generation (i.e. brainstorming), problem solving, or creative processes of an exploratory nature.