An examination of group process in judgmental forecasting

Forecasting in organizations is frequently judgmental in nature and often takes place in groups. Yet past group research has led to little insight into the group judgment process. In this study the relationships among individual predictive judgment accuracy, confidence, influence, and group judgment accuracy are examined in four real-time sales forecasting tasks. Four group techniques- Dictator, Consensus, Dialectic, and Delphi-are used by ongoing work groups to make forecasts. Results show that all of the group techniques led to forecast accuracy better than the level obtained by averaging biased individual pre-group forecasts. The greatest improvements were observed for (a) the first round of the Delphi technique and (b) the selection of the member judged to have the most accurate pregroup individual forecasts in the Dictator technique. However, the pattern of association between group and individual accuracy and confidence varies with group technique. Recommendations for further research relating group process to group performance and for improving group forecasts are given.