The Communication Structrue in Group Decision Making Meetings

An observation study from the “self-organization” perspective

Abstract

How to increase the intelectual productivity of group decision making meetings, such as of planning and strategy making, is an important problem to solve in Japan, where business firms place emphases on consensus decision making. While advanced information technologies help develop group decision support systems to deal with the problem, the knowledge of the structure and process of communication in such meetings is essentially needed to design the systems. In order to acquire the kowledge, the author obseved and analyzed several group decision making meetings which were set for the experimental purposes. The “self-organization” perspective was used to focus on how the context and content of discussing communication emerged during the time of meeting. Results show that the intelectual productivity of the meetings highly related with the amount of control made on the emerging context of discussion. The control was provided by the partcipants' consciousness of how to discuss in the process of meeting.