The impact of group member characteristics on the use of Group Decision Support Systems

While one main stream of research in GDSS (Group Decision Support System) is to investigate how GDSS affects decision-making performances of groups according to task types, support features, meeting facilitation modes and meeting environments, little study has been done about how group characteristics affect group decision processes and outcomes depending upon whether GDSS is provided or not. So far, most GDSS research has considered group characteristics (e.g. personality homogeneity) as given and did not include it as control variables in experiments. Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate how members of two different groups perceive the use of GDSS in group meetings through lab experiments. The two groups are homogeneous and heterogeneous groups in terms of members' personality mix. This research found that the effect of GDSS is a function of groups' personality homogeneity in regards of the satisfaction on decision process and the communication thoroughness. The support of GDSS and the group homogeneity are proved to influence participant's perception about some dependent variables such as satisfaction on decision process.