Cultural Determinants of Information Processing Shortcuts in Computer Supported Groups

Abstract

Organizations are constantly engaged in actions. If an organization does not take actions, it cannot remain solvent, and if the organization consistently exercises poor judgment in the actions that it takes, it is destined to fail. Organizations do not have minds, and they do not make decisions, they are institutions that empower individual agents to make decisions on their behalf, and empower other individuals to carry out the actions associated with these decisions. These decision making agents can be individuals or groups. The complex nature of organizational decisions creates information overload for individual agents, causing them to engage in a number of information processing shortcuts, which threaten the quality of their decisions. While groups can overcome some of the problems associated with information overload, they are prone to their own shortcomings related to communication and coordination. Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Group Support Systems (GSS) respectively have been employed in an attempt to overcome some of these shortcuts and shortcomings and studies have had mixed results but generally indicate that these technologies are effective (Chan & Limsuwan, 2012). However information processing researchers have not explored the potential moderators between a) information overload and information processing shortcuts or b) communication and coordination problems and group shortcomings. The study proposed in this paper is a first attempt at those ends: a) first we build hypotheses linking cultural factors to information processing shortcuts, both individual and group; b) then we outline a study to test these relationships; c) finally, we validate an instrument to test these hypotheses.