ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the framework for team decision making in which the social structure of a team regulates the flow of information between team members is used as a starting point for managing team interaction toward quality objectives. A form is proposed for the time dependent relationships between the flow of ideas and negative evaluations that are hypothesized to maximize decision quality. The quality of ill-structured decisions is assumed to be a monotone increasing function of the number of ideas exchanged. In contrast, the relationship between the number of negatives and decision quality is assumed to be quadratic. While negative evaluations contribute to decision quality by sorting ideas, too large a number of negative information type can decrease the number of ideas generated in the team.
