Leveraging member knowledge in group decision-making: Expertise, extroversion, and feedback.

This paper focuses on how cooperative groups generate estimates. We investigate how a novel method of increasing the demonstrability of an estimation task, which we call “bridge-building” (i.e., using existing knowledge to address unknown problems), affects the decision-making methods and performance of groups and individuals. We compare this to the effects of providing groups with explicit feedback on member expertise. Results indicate that estimates generated both by groups in the bridge-building condition and groups with feedback were best predicted by a model assuming decisions to be weighted to reflect the accuracy of members on that and all previous estimates. When groups had neither intervention, their decisions were best fit by a model assuming group influence to be a function of member extroversion. Finally, results indicate that the bridge-building manipulation interacts with the type of problem solver generating the estimate such that groups improve whereas the performance of poor individual problem solvers further declines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)