Effects of facilitation and leadership on meeting outcomes in a group support system environment
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Effects of facilitation and leadership on meeting outcomes in a group support system environment BCY Tan1, Kwok-Kee Wei1 and J-E Lee-Partridge2 1
Department of Information Systems, 2Department of Decision Sciences, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260, Republic of Singapore This study investigates the effects of facilitation and leadership on outcomes of meetings involving group support systems (GSS). It extends existing GSS literature by examining the critical roles of facilitation and leadership simultaneously within a single study. A 2×2 factorial controlled laboratory experiment was conducted. A preference task, which had no objective correct answers, was employed. Ten five-person groups completed each treatment. Independent variables were facilitation (with vs without) and leadership (with vs without). During their meetings, facilitators and leaders carried out task and interactional interventions respectively. Dependent variables were measures of meeting success (post-meeting consensus, decision confidence, discussion quality, and process satisfaction). Results reveal that: (1) facilitation appears to raise decision confidence; (2) leadership appears to enhance discussion quality and process satisfaction; (3) in the absence of leadership, facilitation seems to lower post-meeting consensus; and (4) in the absence of facilitation, leadership seems to raise post-meeting consensus. These results are compared with findings from prior related studies. Implications of these results for practice are discussed.
Introduction Group meetings are a critical aspect of organizational communication in spite of the fact that they are often time-consuming and potentially unproductive (Mosvick & Nelson, 1987). Group support systems (GSS), which incorporate electronic tools to support group work, have been proposed as a means to raise productivity of group meetings (Dennis & Gallupe, 1993). However, empirical findings have revealed that GSS are not a panacea for such productivity problems (Benbasat & Lim, 1993; Dennis et al, 1996). In general, field studies tend to report more consistent and positive GSS impact than laboratory studies (Dennis & Gallupe, 1993). Scholars have observed that groups may sometimes not benefit from GSS because they lack the ability to use GSS tools appropriately during their meetings (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994). GSS impact on group meetings can be enhanced through facilitation (George et al, 1992; Dickson et al, 1993; Anson et al, 1995), a set of activities carried out to help groups achieve better outcomes before, during, or after their meetings (Bostrom et al, 1993). Task and interactional interventions form the core of such activities. Task interventions are strategies that assist groups to resolve substantive and procedural problems arising from their tasks, thereby carrying out their tasks more effectively (Lee-Partridge, 1992). Interactional in
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