Negotiating group decisions

Conclusion The research on negotiations, coalition formation, and group decision making suggests numerous ways to improve the quality of group decisions ranging from selection and training of group members, development of norms to maximize the amount of relevant information considered by the group, and the selection of an approach to integrate that information. In thinking about managing the process, it is useful to consider what may be done at the time a task force or team is formed, what needs to be done prior to decision making, and what may be done to integrate information and preferences to make high quality decisions. Table 5 organizes the ideas discussed in this article by stages.An interesting question is how overtly a group leader or member may act in managing this process. Groups themselves do not seem to engage in much deliberate planning. They often jump into their tasks only to back off and plan when they find themselves hopelessly frustrated, such as in the MIS task force in our example. Most groups do not have the luxury of team-building training—learning techniques to reach high quality group decisions in a simulated environment. So, it is often up to individual group members to direct the group to use processes that will produce high quality decisions. Jeanne M. Brett is the DeWitt W. Buchanan, Jr. Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, III, 60208.