Purpose – More studies are beginning to support the role of distributed, as opposed to solo, leadership in team performance, but distributed leadership (DL) has not always been linked to higher performance. It may need to be co‐ordinated, rather than misaligned or fragmented, and may be most effective in teams performing interdependent tasks. DL has not often been linked to team information processing, however; viewing leadership as involving information management, it is proposed that DL may be linked to higher levels of information exchange and information integration, of both shared and unshared information. A series of research propositions are then developed with the purpose of exploring further the role of DL in team decision making, especially in terms of information exchange and information integration processes in Chinese and Western groups.Design/methodology/approach – The paper derives a number of research propositions from the literature on DL and information processing and applies them to dec...

Distributed leadership, knowledge and information management and team performance in Chinese and Western groups

: Research has indicated that group decision making participants have difficulty in sharing their uniquely held information and in integrating unique information from other participants. An on-line knowledge elicitation technique is proposed where participants assign a variety of cognitive assessments to each retained decision-relevant information item. These assessments might include source credibility, timeliness, information uncertainty, direction of impact on the related decision criterion as well as overall importance of the information item. The assessments are automatically converted into a small color-coded icon called an Information Object (IOB). The IOB can then be used in place of the text version of the item, much as tactical symbology replaces raw radar video. The display, sharing, manipulation and algorithmic sorting of these IOBs permits all participants to access each item and simplifies the process of integrating the arriving information and making quality decisions. The attached individual information quality assessments also permit a highly focused discussion exchange, reducing the time required for conflict resolution and consensus building.

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Information Exchange and Display in Asynchronous C2 Group Decision Making

We take advantage of a naturally occurring experiment in a television game show to study the impact of group characteristics on their ability to select salient solutions in a matching game. The Family Feud features families seeking to earn prizes by matching the results of public opinion surveys on various subjects. Our main result is that, controlling for task difficulty, families that are more diverse, as measured by both the intra-family generational gap and the relatedness of their members, are more successful at matching wider ranges of survey responses. This highlights the importance of member diversity in expanding information and decision frames of reference within a group.

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Group Diversity and Salience: A Natural Experiment from a Television Game Show

: Two of the more subjective processes in decision making involve forming an opinion about each decision-relevant information item (i.e., the impact and importance of that item to any decision option) and then selecting one option based upon some form of cognitive weighting of the entire information pool. The decision support package described here simplifies and quantifies these two processes by supplying an intuitive interface to capture: (1) location of the information item (2) content of the information item (3) quality of the information (4) timeliness of the information (5) decision option impacted (6) nature of that impact and (7) the importance of the item. Using a weighting matrix, the subjective assessments of impact and importance for each information item are converted into single score and then all the information item scores for a particular decision option are summed. The final total scores are used to quantitatively assess the ranking all the various decision options. An exchange module makes all assessments available to all participants, enabling the group to quickly focus on the key differing individual assessments causing any lack of group consensus.

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Quantification of Subjective Information Assessments in C2 Decision Option Selection

: Collaborative command and control environments for team decision making and situation assessment are becoming increasingly more distributed in time and space. Shared understanding among team members with regard to the impact, importance, and quality of relevant information items (e.g., sensor outputs, text documents, images, message traffic, web pages) is a critical element in the selection of an effective course of action. Here, we focus on the issues of (1) what is the minimum information that needs to be exchanged for shared understanding to occur, (2) how do we capture that information and (3) how should it best be displayed? Distributed teams that communicate asynchronously require a knowledge management plug-in tool that will convert, encapsulate, and tag a group member's subjective understanding of a complex information item into an iconic representation that represent various information parameters. These icons are referred to as Information Objects (IOBs) and are automatically generated from an abstraction template completed by a team member for each decision-relevant information item. These IOBs can then easily be electronically exchanged among the team, improving shared understanding, consensus building, and information fusion among group members and significantly reducing the valuable decision time typically consumed by conflict resolution.

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Improving Collaboration in Command and Control Environments: Creating and Exchanging Iconic Tags of Key Information

: This report contains a detailed review of the literature on the use of unshared and shared information in a group decision-making situation, and two conclusions can be drawn: (1) People are not very effective in communicating unshared information groups tend to focus their discussion on information that is already shared, with the result that little, if any, unshared information moves into the shared environment, and (2) when unshared information does move into the shared environment, participants tend to ignore or discount this information and not factor it into their decision process in an effective manner. The net result is many group decisions are based on incomplete information, i.e., decisions are made without taking into account information that would be available to the group if they were optimally exchanging and integrating unshared information. Consequently, group decisions may be sub-optimal when critical information is held by individuals and not shared. The preponderance of the literature on group decision-making is based on experimental groups working in a face-to-face environment, and the findings have been attributed to a variety of social and cognitive influences. In contrast, much of modern military command and control decision-making is not predicated on face-to-face groups, but on time/place asynchronous collaboration where the decision process is often distributed over time and location. Proposed is a research program called START (Structure, Tag, And Release Templates) that will develop group consensus on critical decision evaluation categories, parameters, and qualifying values.

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J. L. Kaiwi

Papers

The Problem of Unshared Information in Group Decision-Making: A Summary of Research and the Implications for Command and Control