Discussion Questions on Project Team Decision Making

What are the advantages and disadvantages to group decision making?

As outline in Organization Behavior, A Strategic Approach, there are many advantages and disadvantages to group decision making.

Advantages:

• Groups can generate more and better alternatives
• Groups can display superior judgment when evaluating options
• Group decisions typically generate higher acceptance
• Group decision making can help individual members grow

Disadvantages:

• Takes more time to reach decisions
• Compromises may limit full evaluation of ideas
• Groups can be dominated by one or two key people
• Managers may rely too much on groups

Give an example of a decision made by a group that you were involved in.

About 5 years ago I lead a large team responsible for upgrading our network operating system to Active Directory. We experienced many of the advantages and disadvantages described above while attempting to make decisions. We had no shortage of ideas generated from the group (advantage). Most critical areas were discussed in detail, which lead to better overall decisions (advantage). But decisions typically took a long time (disadvantage) and key technical areas were typically dominated by a small number of the people on the team (disadvantage).

One of the most difficult decisions that the group had to make was to determine the administrative rights for each of the teams that would use the system going forward. The decision directly impacted the daily roles and responsibilities of a group of teams within the IT organization.

Describe the group dynamics involved in making the decision.

There were seven groups affected by the delegation of administration decision. Two of the groups, the Admin Team and the Infrastructure Team had equal administrative rights prior to the Active Directory deployment. However, based on security requirements, we were asked to reduce the total number of administors from 12 (the number at that time) to four. The Admin team felt that they should have all four on their team while the Infrastructure team felt they should be the ones with the admin rights. In addition, another team of IT resources in our UK office felt they needed admin rights since they were responsible for supporting our international locations.

As the project manager I allowed the project team to discuss the merits of each approach for some time. Each team was trying to convince the others that their approach was the right one, but they were unable to gain agreement across the larger project team. I realized that we would not come to a group agreement, so I made a recommendation to the project sponsors, obtained their support, and then delivered the decision to the team. I asked the security group to increase the number of admins from four to five, assigned two to the Admin Team, two to the Infrastructure Team, and one to the team in the UK. The project team found this to be an acceptable solution and we were able to move forward.

Sources

Hitt, M. A., Miller, C. C., & Colella, A. (2006). Organizational Behavior: A Strategic Approach. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley; Sons, Inc.