Information Exchange in Personnel Selection Decisions

Personnel selection decisions often involve group decisions in which individual group members do not share all the available information about candidates. Serial interviews are one example of this situation. Although serial interview techniques are commonly used to select employees, the selection literature has not extensively investigated serial interviewing, especially the process of coming to a selection decision as a group at the conclusion of the process. The information exchange literature is used to shed light on this process. Results showed that groups often failed to exchange sufficient information to come to the correct decision, discussed a higher proportion of negative than positive information, and discussed more information that was already common knowledge to all group members than information initially known only to one member. Implications for selection procedures are discussed

Motivated information processing in group judgement and decision making

This article expands the view of groups as information processors into a motivated information processing in groups (MIP-G) model by emphasizing, first, the mixedmotive structure of many group tasks and, second, the idea that individuals engage in more or less deliberate information search and processing. The MIP-G model postulates that social motivation drives the kind of information group members attend to, encode, and retrieve and that epistemic motivation drives the degree to which new information is sought and attended to, encoded, and retrieved. Social motivation and epistemic motivation are expected to influence, alone and in combination, generating problem solutions, disseminating information, and negotiating joint decisions. The MIP-G model integrates the influence of many individual and situational differences and combines insight on human thinking with group-level interaction process and decision making

The Ecological Rationality of Simple Group Heuristics: Effects of Group Member Strategies on Decision Accuracy

The notion of ecological rationality implies that the accuracy of a decision strategy depends on features of the information environment in which it is tested. We demonstrate that the performance of a group may be strongly affected by the decision strategies used by its individual members and specify how this effect is moderated by environmental features. Specifically, in a set of simulation studies, we systematically compared four decision strategies used by the individual group members: two linear, compensatory decision strategies and two simple, noncompensatory heuristics. Individual decisions were aggregated by using a majority rule. To assess the ecological rationality of the strategies, we varied (a) the distribution of cue validities, (b) the quantity, and (c) the quality of shared information. Group performance strongly depended on the distribution of cue validities. When validities were linearly distributed, groups using a compensatory strategy achieved the highest accuracy. Conversely, when cue validities followed a J-shaped distribution, groups using a simple lexicographic heuristic performed best. While these effects were robust across different quantities of shared information, the quality of shared information exerted stronger effects on group performance. Consequences for prescriptive theories on group decision making are discussed Copyright Springer 2006compensatory and noncompensatory decision strategies, group decision making, group performance, simple heuristics,