Group decision support systems. The cultural factor

Abstract

Information technologies are socio-technical in that they consist of people (the human or 'socio' side), non-human resources (the technical side), and the interaction between these two. They cannot be culture-free because the cultural factor associated with the human component will always be present. An information technology that is appropriate in one national culture is not necessarily appropriate in another. This paper reports an empirical study of group decision support systems (GDSS) conducted in Singapore. It describes the cultural differences between the USA and Singapore and discusses how these differences may affect the application of the existing body of GDSS findings to Singapore. This cross-cultural analysis of GDSS research findings is based on two studies carried out in the USA and Singapore. By adopting a very similar research design and employing the same GDSS software and research task, the authors are able to eliminate most of the contextual variables and the situational factors that might possibly account for the differences in research findings and explain these differences in terms of cultural factors.