Culture and Media Effects on Group Decision Making under Majority Influence

The purpose of this study is to address questions on how collectivistic and individualistic cultures affect majority influence in a group decision making task when there are differences in media richness. We developed a theory that explains and predicts these phenomena, and tested hypotheses using 112 four-person groups that consisted of Chinese and U.S. participants. As predicted, we found strong evidence indicating that there were significant differences between Chinese and U.S. groups, with Chinese groups being more prone to follow the view of majority. Further, traditional face-to-face (FtF) unsupported groups experienced the strongest majority influence. We found that GSS use helped diminish majority influence in both Chinese and U.S. groups. These findings have broad theoretical and applied implications, which are discussed in this paper.

1. Introduction

The objective of group support systems (GSS) is to improve group task performance and quality of outcomes by breaking down communication barriers to make people less sensitive to contextual restrictions on behavior [24]. One way GSS may help groups is to decrease negative forms of majority influence. Majority influence is the attempt by a majority of group members to impose their common position on group dissenters during a decision-making process [22]. Strong majority influence can lead to poor organizational decisions, since people may not oppose incorrect majority positions because they fear reprisal from or negative evaluation by the majority [33]. People tend to adopt a majority position and convince themselves of the truth of that position by considering the issue only from the majority perspective [27].