Suchergebnisse

From an organizational perspective, there are many decisions that are not strictly individual. A decision-making process may need to be distributed across multiple participants, each of whom contributes to the final decision by performing one or more tasks. A participant may be a person, a group, a team, or an artifact such as a computerized decision-support system. Computers are routinely used to support individual decision making. However, their potential for supporting distributed decision making is only beginning to be actualized. Further progress in exploring and realizing this potential can benefit greatly from a formal model that accounts for the diverse phenomena that can occur within a distributed decision maker. When considering computer-based support for distributed decision making, the issue of coordinating the multiple participants becomes the central concern. Coordination defines the structural and dynamic patterns of inter-participant relationships in an organization. It has several aspects including planning, control, and review. Planning involves task decomposition, subtask allocation and synthesis. Control indicates mediation, negotiation and execution. And review deals with performance evaluation which will then contribute to organizational learning. Moreover, coordination occurs in a context of concurrent problem-solving tasks where multiple decisions are pending simultaneously. Bits and pieces of these coordination facets have been somewhat supported by existing computer technologies, such as decision-support systems and computer-mediated communication systems. However, systematic study of such support possibilities depends on formal models of distributed decision making as organizing paradigms. In this paper, we present a model of distributed decision making that is particularly concerned with the ongoing coordination among participants in multiple simultaneously active decision processes. Basic outlines of the model are presented as an initial foundation for understanding the possibilities of computer-based support for distributed decision making. The model takes the view that an organization is dynamic in terms of its capacity for improved coordination over time and through experience. It accommodates a bidding perspective as the context for coordination. The use and adjustment of entity reputation offers a means for improved coordination over time, and for capturing the phenomenon of organizational learning.

Facing increasingly complex tasks involving coordination, communication and interactions among multiple decision makers, organizations are undergoing a transition, experimenting with new forms such as the team-based structure, and investing heavily in network-based computing to support team activities. We take the position that for the new form to succeed, and for computing investments to pay off, the organizational designer must consider complementarity effects between incentives, IS design, and organizational and task characteristics. Since these factors impact group performance through complex interactions, a change in one factor necessitates changes in others. We develop a stylized, analytical model of group/team interactions involving computing support, and study the impact of various design factors and their interactions on group productivity. Key research issues include the choice of a team/group reward structure, the impact of team composition and computing system features on the overall payoff, incentives for monitoring peers and their effect on group output, the time allocation of group members between peer monitoring and task effort, and the effect of task interdependence on monitoring incentives. The theoretical model provides a set of propositions showing how interactions between the chosen reward system, system design features and organizational factors determine members' behavior (e.g., the extent of free riding and shirking) and subsequently the organizational payoff. These results provide broad qualitative implications for designing incentive schemes and information systems for appropriating maximum organizational value in team-based environments.