ABSTRACT
Today’s proliferation of committee duties, board meetings, and so on, and the inefficiencies occasionally experienced in those meetings pose a rather basic question to one of the “truisms” in our society: Why do we use groups when deciding important issues? What is wrong with entrusting those decisions to a benevolent leader who is very competent? There seem to be at least two causes or assumptions behind our inclination to decision making by groups. The first is a belief in the ultimate superiority of group problem-solving ability to individual ability: Although groups may sometimes be inefficient, they are regarded to be on average or in the long run superior to, or at least more stable than individuals acting alone on a decision task (see the other chapters in this volume for social-psychological assessments of the validity of this assumption). The second cause for the use of groups is concerned with social values that seem to be widely accepted in modern society. People tend to reject the notion of decisions being imposed by a single authority, because they sense some kind of “dictatorship” in such a system. Jury decision making provides a good example of this point. Although the “accuracy” of jury verdicts is sometimes in serious doubt (e.g., civil cases containing highly technological material), people still seem to reject the notion that a professional and competent authority should solely decide the case (cf. Hastie, Penrod, & Pennington, 1983; Kalven & Zeisel, 1966). Related to this point is public acceptance of a decision. The literature on participative decision making in organizational contexts has repeatedly shown that employees’ participation in a decision process increases the acceptability of the ensuing decision and eases its subsequent implementation (Kotter & Schlesinger, 1981; Locke & Schweiger, 1979). Along with the findings from the research on procedural justice (cf. Lind & Tyler, 1988; Thibaut & Walker, 1975), these notions indicate that people generally value a participative or collective form of decision making; a decision process that is monopolized by a single authority tends to be suspected or even criticized as “undemocratic,” even though the ensuing decision may be objectively superb and fair.
