A Winning Strategy for Improving Group Decision-Making

We all work in groups sometimes. We brainstorm in groups. Students work on group projects. Even faculty at universities work in committees, and our research projects are generally collaborations. Since we spend so much time and effort working in groups, it would be nice to have a few tools that could easily improve group brainstorming and decision-making.

Luckily, there’s an approach that reliably improves group decision-making. It works in laboratory tasks over short time periods. It also helps long-term groups in science and business succeed.

This key approach relies on group diversity.

Diversity and Brainstorming

When we confront a problem, we start by brainstorming possible solutions. The goal of brainstorming is to generate possible solutions, without evaluating those ideas during the brainstorming session. You want to generate a variety of ideas, you want the ideas to be creative, and you want at least some of the ideas to be high quality. Here are two pieces of advice for improving brainstorming.

First, you should start by thinking individually. Later, you can bring the group together to construct a possible set of options. When people start by thinking of their own ideas first, they will generate a greater variety of ideas. If we begin by generating together, we are often limited by the first ideas that people provide. These first ideas tend to block people from coming up with a wider range of possibilities because those are at the forefront of their thoughts (Hyman, Cardwell, & Roy, 2010; Deihl & Strobe, 1987). By brainstorming individually first, groups start with a wider range of suggestions. And hearing that wider variety of ideas may help people generate even more possibilities.

In addition to brainstorming individually first, having a more diverse group also leads to a wider set of options and more creative options. The research on the value of having people from diverse cultural backgrounds contributing to group brainstorming goes back at least three decades (McLeod, Lobel, & Cox, 1996). In this work, groups with greater diversity performed better in generating effective ideas than groups that were culturally homogeneous (Flores and colleagues, 2021). More recent work illustrates that creating a context in which the contributions from people from various cultural backgrounds are valued is important for getting that broader set of creative contributions (Camargo and colleagues, 2020).

The findings for diversity and brainstorming are clear. More diverse groups result in more and better ideas. Organizations can increase the effectiveness of diverse groups by creating contexts in which the contributions of everyone are valued.

Diversity Improves Decision-Making and Improves Performance

Diversity can help collaborative work beyond the idea generation stage. Diverse groups also improve decision-making, potentially by decreasing the likelihood that groups will fall into a groupthink failure pattern. In groupthink, people tend to quickly agree on an answer and may fail to consider a variety of options. In some cases, this can lead a group to get stuck because they fail to evaluate the risks and benefits of a variety of options.

In a study of how people make decisions related to price bubbles in markets, Levine and colleagues (2014) looked at culturally homogeneous and diverse groups. The task was a game in which people played something like a stock market. If they did well, they could earn real money. In conditions with less diversity, price bubbles were more likely to grow, and crashes were harder. In more diverse groups, with people from different countries, the bubbles were more limited and crashes less severe.

Diversity Improves Real-World Outcomes

How does this play out in real situations? This is harder to assess, but some researchers have looked at group composition in different professional contexts. One set of researchers looked at law firms in terms of diversity (Smulowitz et al., 2019). Law firms with more diversity had greater financial performance than firms with less diversity. In a very different domain, AlShebli and colleagues (2018) looked at the impact of diversity on scientific research. They looked at more than 9 million published academic papers, assessing author diversity in terms of gender and ethnic background. They found that when the set of authors was more ethnically diverse, the paper had a greater impact on other researchers (measured as the number of times other researchers cited the paper).

Diversity Works

Having more diverse groups leads to better brainstorming. More diverse groups are less likely to fall into groupthink and get stuck in ugly financial bubbles. And diversity improves the financial outcomes of groups as well. You can argue that creating contexts that support diversity is important for providing opportunities to a greater variety of people. But even if you ignore that motivation, more diverse groups seem to be simply better for ideas and outcomes.