A STUDY OF TWO DIFFERENT EXPERIMENTAL SETTINGS FOR GROUP AWARENESS INFORMATION IN A WEB-BASED GROUP DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

Group awareness information represents things such as group members' roles and responsibilities, their positions on an issue, their status, and the state of various group processes that group members know about when they work together. The group awareness information presented in this paper is designed to capture group member activities and their behaviors in web-based collaborative work. It consists of activity, availability, and commitment/disposition information. The first two parameters appear as a visual display representing cumulative data and changes accordingly when the group begins working together. The last parameter is captured during group work and is summarized at the end of the group work task. The application of this proposed scheme was designed and implemented in a web-based group decision support system. This paper reports on the results of a study in a controlled experiment and a field test experiment that examined group performance on a given task in a web-based group decision support system with and without group awareness information. In particular, the study examined how group awareness information impacts the quality of the work effort and a given task, group decision making by members in the same group and different groups, the communications among group members during the completion of an online collaborative authoring task, the cohesiveness among group members in a web-based group decision support system, and the commitment/disposition of engagement of each member of the work group.