Does GDSS promote more democratic decision-making? The Singapore experiment

Abstract

The authors report the results of an experiment conducted to investigate the effects of GDSS (group decision support systems) and elected leadership on decision processes in small-group, face-to-face meetings in an oriental cultural setting. The group task was a preference allocation task which has no right solution. The dependent variables studied were influence imbalance and dominance significance, which provide insight into how democratic the group decision-making process is. The decision-making process was coded using L.L. Putnam's (1981) procedural coding system to facilitate measurement of the two dependent variables. An interaction effect was observed on the influence imbalance. For those groups without elected leaders, GDSS promoted lower influence imbalance, which means a more even distribution of influence compared to a no-support treatment. For the groups with an elected leader, no difference was observed for the decision support variable. Dominance significance, which measures the influence of the most dominant member in the group, was found to be lower with GDSS support. On the other hand, the elected-leader groups reported higher dominance significance than the groups without elected leaders.