Participation and Information Sharing

This chapter highlights the importance of group member participation in discussion and contribution of information as key to effective group decision making and problem solving. Viewed through a framework of task demonstrability, which is how solvable a group task is, we show that groups benefit from sufficient information and a shared conceptual system to solve the problem with which they are tasked. With this foundation, individual and contextual factors influence whether members contribute their information and whether other members accept as valid the information of others. A hidden profile task, where key information is distributed across group members, is one that is potentially solvable under these task demonstrability conditions. We illustrate how to improve hidden profile task performance by describing the conditions under which group members participate and share their unique information.