Comparison of the Decision Quality of Group Decisions Made in a Face- to-Face Environment with Decisions Made Using a Distributed Group Decision Support System

The Air Force is increasingly turning to a team approach for decision making. When team members are geographically separated it can be expensive for them to meet in a traditional face to face setting. Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS), designed to help groups make decisions, may be able to support these groups in a distributed mode. The assertion of this thesis is that a GDSS can indeed support such distributed processes and that these processes will be of higher quality than decisions made in a face to face environment. This study explores decision quality in terms of quality of the outcome, and acceptance of the decision by group participants. Through a laboratory experiment, groups of three or four members met to solve a management problem. Results suggest that quality of the decision depends upon the type of group interaction, the order of that interaction and the scenario difficulty. The analysis found no statistically significant difference for decision quality in either type of group interaction. Additional research is necessary to examine the potential for Air Force use of distributed GDSS to reduce travel costs without reducing decision quality.Air Force Inst of Tech Wright-Patterson AFB OH is the author of 'Comparison of the Decision Quality of Group Decisions Made in a Face- to-Face Environment with Decisions Made Using a Distributed Group Decision Support System', published 1997 under ISBN 9781423567790 and ISBN 142356779X.