The impact of immediate feedback on group decision satisfaction

Group Support Systems (GSSs) are designed as an analysis tool to support the decision processes of group. Inherent in the design is the developer's desire to make the basic meeting process "better"; either by increasing process gains or reducing process losses. Further, it is suggested that one way that GSSs attack these losses is by providing immediate feedback (2, 11, 17). GSSs provide immediate feedback to groups different levels of functionality by simply providing open, anonymous discussions (Level 1) or by calculating and reporting on levels of consensus (Level 2) as the meeting moves along. Much research has compared groups using the electronic meeting environment to groups using the traditional environment and, in so doing, has found differences on two outcome measures: satisfaction and level of consensus. These results have been left somewhat independent of the basic GSS characteristic of immediate feedback. The study reported here concentrates on identifying any interaction between satisfaction and level of consensus caused by the immediate feedback characteristic of a GSS. The fundamental question is: Does the immediate feedback of a calculated level of meeting consensus impact the satisfaction with that meeting? While we accept that there are differences between verbal and electronic meeting environments, the answer to this question will help tease out whether or not the ability of GSSs to calculate and display a group's level of consensus plays a significant role in the differences.