Task-related Information Sharing in Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) The Importance of Knowing Who Knows What

Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) are among the most common software systems designed to enable and enhance group communication for collective decision-making. Members of a work group normally confer and exchange information in order to make decisions and there are three types of task-related information: common (or shared) information known by all members of a work group; unique (or unshared) information known by only one group member; and partially shared information known by more than one but not all members. To date, only a handful of studies have evaluated information exchange in GDSS groups engaged in decision-making and this study examines the effect of expertise role-assignment and the proportion of common, unique, and partially shared information available in GDSS groups. The results indicate that information distribution and expertise role-assignment can affect information sharing in GDSS groups. Increasing the proportion of unique information distribution can be used as a way to enhance the pooling of unique information in expertise role-assigned groups. Expertise role-assignment increases the amount of partially shared information during group discussions and increasing the proportion of unique information results in an increase in the retaining of partially shared information but decreases the retaining of unique information following group discussions.

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