Randy Y. Hirokawa and Abran J. Salazar
Task-Group Communication and
Decision-Making Performance
Overview
• Why do some groups arrive at high-quality
decisions whereas others do not?
– Research supports the claim that group decisionmaking performance is influenced by informational
resources, group effort, critical thinking skills, and
decision rules and logic.
– The relationship between group-communication and
decision-making outcomes has been explored in three
research perspectives:
• Mediational
• Functional
• Constitutive
Mediational Perspective
• Group interaction process is a “medium
through which the ‘true’ determinants of
group decision-making performance are able
to exert influence.”
• In this perspective, “factors other than
communication account for the performance
of decision-making groups.”
Mediational Perspective
• Factors that account for performance
– Group member acquisition, distribution, and pooling
of knowledge/information needed for effective
decision making
– Exposure and remedy of individual group member’s
informational, judgmental, and reasoning deficiencies
– Exertion of sufficient effort, possession of adequate
knowledge and skill, and use of appropriate taskperformance strategies for the work and setting
Mediational Perspective
• Uncontested Findings (relating
communication to group accuracy and quality
in decision making)
– Two categories of communication behavior
negatively correlated with decision accuracy:
“volunteered information” and “proportion of
transmitted information”
– Measures of group interaction predicted decisionmaking success better than members’ taksrelevant knowledge or training in task-procedures
Mediational Perspective
– Less “ego-defensive” communication is associated with
higher quality group decisions
– More communication that “suggests solution” is
associated with higher quality group decisions
– Groups using active conflict resolution strategies (where
formal authority resolves issues unresolved by seeking
consensus) produced faster decisions of higher quality
than groups that used only consensus to resolve
disagreement
– Groups where cooperation and “genuine information
seeking and compromise” are enforced achieve higher
quality decisions than groups using distributing styles
(winning/losing party, negative evidence, hostile questing,
voting, railroading, or accommodation.
Functional Perspective
• “[I]nteraction is a social tool that group
members use to perform or satisfy various
prerequisites for decision making.” (169)
• Some functionalists simply claim that group
members use communication to persuade one
another.
Functionalist Perspective
• The most advanced functionalist view argues
that a group’s final (big) decision is the result
of small subdecisions reached on four
questions.
– Does the situation require a choice to be made?
– What should be achieve/accomplished by
choosing?
– What choices are available?
– What are the positives and negatives of each
choice?
Functionalist Perspective
• Uncontested Findings (relating
communication to group accuracy and quality
in decision making)
– High quality group decision-making is correlated
with assessment of positive and/or negative
qualities of alternative choices (depending on the
evaluation demanded by the task)
– High quality group decision-making is correlated
with communication that performs problem
analysis and establishes criteria.
Functionalist Perspective
– Groups composed of members with similar
prediscussion preferences tend to produce fewer
communicative utterances fulfilling functional
requisites of successful decision-making.
– It is indicated that communication has greater
impact on decision-making quality as intractability
of task and heterogeneity of member’s
predispositions increase. (!)
Constitutive Perspective
• Focuses on the role of communication in the
constitution of group decisions. Two forms of
constitutive perspective:
– Group decisions are “emerging texts or developing
ideas” wherein communication is the process by
which form and content of decisions is worked out.
– Group decision are social products that emerge from a
social milieu (or reality) created and sustained by
communication. Two representatives: Social
Convergence Theory and Structuration Theory.
Constitutive Perspective
– Symbolic Convergence Theory: consensual group
decisions emerge from the presence of a shared
symbolic world (rhetorical vision) generated by storytelling.
– Structuration Theory: group members draw on a
group’s structures, i.e., rules and resources, when
they communicate with an aim toward decision.
• Rules describe and explain appropriate and expected
communicative behavior and how such behavior should be
interpreted.
• Resources are materials, knowledge, and skills.
• Structures guide group communication and are generated by
such communication.
Constitutive Perspective
• Uncontested Findings (relating
communication to group accuracy and quality
in decision making)
– Groups’ ability to surface and resolve opposition
(substantive conflict) was influenced by the Group
Decision Support System employed in decisionmaking.
Conclusion
• “What types of advice can communication
scholars give to practitioners concerning how
to improve the accuracy and quality of the
decisions groups make, or help groups reach
consensus?”
• “The answer, sadly, is ‘Not Much.”