Description
Supervisory and Managing Board members are often in group decision-making situations that impact entire organisations. The aim of the current research is to investigate into what extent Supervisory and Managing Board members are able to choose the optimal solution in group decision-making when having shared as well as unique information (i.e., hidden profile paradigm), and whether an intervention that aims at stimulating pooling members unique information improves their decision-making. A field experiment was conducted among Supervisory and Managing Board members, who were randomly assigned to groups of three in order to participate in a candidate selection task (N = 25). Each group member received shared as well as unique information about three candidates, indicated his or her first preference, and engaged in group discussion in order to jointly choose the best candidate. The optimal solution could have only been found by the group if all unique information was pooled during group discussion. Before group discussion, in the intervention group (N = 15) members blindly drew a card stating which candidate to represent during group discussion. The control group (N = 10) received no intervention. Surprisingly, there was no significant difference between the intervention group and the control group in choosing the optimal solution. It appeared that the first preference of the majority significantly predicted group decisions, which was only in 24 percent of the cases the optimal one. Therefore, future research should aim more directly at reducing the effect of first preferences of the majority on group decision-making.| Period | 3 Oct 2018 |
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| Event title | New directions in behaviour change |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Nijmegen, NetherlandsShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |