Judgmental Decisions: A Study of Interactions Among Group Membership, Group Functioning, and the Decision Situation

A study was conducted to investigate experimentally whether the effectiveness of decisions made by judgmental decision making (JDM) groups is influenced by hypothesized interactions among 3 variables: 1. group membership, 2. methods of functioning, and 3. the decision situation. The subjects were 540 business students at a large northeastern university. Five-person groups were randomly formed within classes, and subjects were exposed to various decision situations.There were strong interactions among membership types, group functioning, and six different decision situations. The results suggest that meta-decisions made when forming a JDM group affect the effectiveness of decisions. The generalizability of this research is limited to the extent that business students' decisions when performing short duration experimental tasks may not be representative of managerial decisions. Figure.