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This study examines information exchange and decision-making processes in small groups that interacted verbally orwitha group support system (GSS). Six-memberGSSand non-GSS groups worked to solve a hidden profile task in which members had different information and needed to share their information to discover the optimal decision. Both GSS and non-GSS groups exchanged only a small portion of the available information. Both made poor decisions because they lacked sufficient information and failed to effectively use the shared information. GSS groups were less likely to use the shared information, possibly because anonymity reduced the information's credibility or the GSS impaired members' abilities to integrate the newly received information into their existing base of information.

This article argues that a large part of idea-generation behavior in electronic brainstorming (EBS) can be explained by viewing EBS as an individual, cognitive (rather than a social) phenomenon from the human information processing system (IPS) perspective. EBS incorporates a set of structuringmechanisms meant to overcome the limitations of the human IPS. Consequently, a group using an EBS outperforms both verbal brainstorming and nominal groups by operating not as a group but as a collection of individuals who interact with an evolving set of ideas rather than with other individuals. We present a research agenda oriented toward the development of strategies, procedures, and technologiesfor stimulating idea generation. Based on this agenda, we identify the problem of information overload in EBS; develop a set of strategies for addressing the problem, grounded in human information-processing theory; andformulate a set of propositions for testing the strategies.

ABSTRACTOrganizational decision making is dominated by teams. When an important decision is required, a team is often formed to make it or to advise the individual decision maker, because a team has more resources, knowledge, and political insight than any one individual working alone. As teams have become geographically distributed, collaboration technology has come to play an important role in such collective decision making efforts. Instant messaging (IM) is an increasingly prevalent workplace collaboration technology that enables near‐synchronous text exchanges on a variety of devices. We examined the use of IM during face‐to‐face, telephone, and computer‐mediated team meetings, a practice we call "invisible whispering." We introduce Goffman's characterization of social interaction as dramatic performance, differentiable into "front stage" and "backstage" exchanges, to analyze how invisible whispering alters the socio‐spatial and temporal boundaries of team decision making. Using IM, workers were able to influence front stage decision making through backstage conversations, often participating in multiple backstage conversations simultaneously. This type of interaction would be either physically impossible or socially constrained without the use of IM. We examine how invisible whispering changes the processes of collaborative decision making and how these new processes may affect the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative decision making, as well as participation, satisfaction, relationships among team members, and individual attention.

Organizational decision making is dominated by teams. When an important decision is required, a team is often formed to make it or to advise the individual decision maker, because a team has more resources, knowledge, and political insight than any one individual working alone. As teams have become geographically distributed, collaboration technology has come to play an important role in such collective decision making efforts. Instant messaging (IM) is an increasingly prevalent workplace collaboration technology that enables near-synchronous text exchanges on a variety of devices. We examined the use of IMduring face-to-face, telephone, and computer-mediated team meetings, a practice we call "invisible whispering." We introduce Goffman's characterization of social interaction as dramatic performance, differentiable into "front stage" and "backstage" exchanges, to analyze how invisible whispering alters the socio-spatial and temporal boundaries of team decision making. Using IM, workers were able to influence front stage decision making through backstage conversations, often participating in multiple backstage conversations simultaneously. This type of interaction would be either physically impossible or socially constrained without the use of IM. We examine how invisible whispering changes the processes of collaborative decision making and how these new processes may affect the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative decision making, as well as participation, satisfaction, relationships among team members, and individual attention.

ABSTRACTDecision making is often based on the rational assessment of information, but recent research shows that emotional sentiment also plays an important role, especially for investment decision making. Emotional sentiment about a firm's stock that spreads rapidly through social media is more likely to be incorporated quickly into stock prices (e.g., on the same trading day it was expressed), while sentiment that spreads slowly takes longer to be incorporated into stock prices and thus is more likely to predict stock prices on future days. We analyzed the cumulative sentiment (positive and negative) in 2.5 million Twitter postings about individual S&P 500 firms and compared this to the stock returns of those firms. Our results show that the sentiment in tweets about a specific firm from users with less than 171 followers (the median in our sample) had a significant impact on the stock's returns on the next trading day, the next 10 days, and the next 20 days. Interestingly, sentiment in tweets from users with fewer than 171 followers that were not retweeted had the greatest impact on future stock returns. A trading strategy based on these findings produced meaningful economic gains on the order of an 11–15% annual return.

ABSTRACTEmployee disinterest in information security remains one of the greatest impediments to effective information security management programs. How can organizations enhance the persuasiveness of the information security messages used to warn employees of threats and encourage employees to take specific actions to improve their security? We use fear appeal theory and the elaboration likelihood model to argue that security messages presented using more personally relevant language are more likely to induce employees to engage in the recommended protective security behaviors. Our strategy uses organization identification theory to segment employees into two groups and then develops security messages that use language aligned with each of the two segments. We tested this strategy within a large U.S. organization, and found that employees were more likely to consider and act upon messages that used language aligned with their organizational identification than messages using language not aligned. The effect size was large. Our results show that subtly changing less than a dozen words in the way a security message was presented without changing its substantive content (e.g., using "our" instead of "your") has both significant and meaningful effects on how employees think about and respond to it.

Media richness theory argues that performance improves when team members use "richer" media for equivocal tasks. Virtually all research on media richness theory has focused on perceptions: surveys of individuals'beliefs about media rather than investigating actual performance with richer versus leaner media. This experiment studied the effects of media richness on decision making in two-person teams (all male, all female, and mixed gender) using one form of "new media" (computer-mediated communication). Participants took longer to make decisions with computer-mediated communication. Matching richness to task equivocality only resulted in better performance for the all-female teams, likely because females are more sensitive to nonverbal communication and more affected by its absence in computer-mediated communication. For remaining teams, using richer face-to-face communication did not improve performance to a greater extent for more equivocal than less equivocal tasks. Results support media richness theory only for all-female teams.

Some for,ns of computer-mediated communication enable groups to engage simultaneously in multiple electronic conversations. One interesting aspect of this technology, in addition to this parallelism, is that the channel is configurable to support forms of group interaction that were previously difficult, if not impossible. This article reports a laboratory experiment that examined the effects of group size (3 and 9 members) and group member anonymity on the performance of groups using a computer-mediated idea-generation system. Although group members in all conditions made, on average, the same number of comments, larger groups generated significantly more ideas (and higher-quality ideas as rated by judges) than did smaller groups. Anzonymity had no effect on ideational performance. Members of small-idenitified groups made the fewest critical remarks, were the most satisfied, and rated themselves more effective than group members from the other experimental conditions.

ABSTRACTWe build on prior theory and research on electronic brainstorming to examine how achievement priming influences individual cognition leading to changes in individual behavior and ultimately team performance. We conducted a repeated measures experiment using electroencephalography with 53 subjects performing two brainstorming tasks. We found that priming altered cognition in the left and right regions of the frontal cortex; that is, achievement priming triggered cognition in areas of the brain related to creative and insightful cognition while the placebo treatment led to cognition in areas related to language production. Thus, priming did not induce "more" cognition, but rather triggered changes in the nature of cognition that led to significantly more ideas and more ideas that were highly novel, workable, and relevant. This study makes two contributions: it shows one theoretical pathway by which achievement priming works; and it show that priming using pictures improves idea generation.