Although organizational decision-making can be very complex, the understanding of technology applications is significant in not only determining the usefulness of virtual groups in organizations, but also in the designing of electronic collaborative activities. Collaborative Communication Processes and Decision Making in Organizations focuses on the role of technology in organizational decision-making processes and activities, providing academics and management teams with current research in the field of virtual teams in organizations. This publication is an essential resource for instructors and students of organization and group communication, and institutions that have networks of offices and employees in multiple geographical locations.

"This book focuses on the role of technology in organizational decision-making processes and activities, providing academics and management teams with current research in the field of virtual teams in organizations"--

Communication and Group Decision-Making takes stock of recent group communication research - with an explicit focus on communication processes. This book is recommended for academics, professionals and researchers in communication and organization

This book presents a simple six step model that anyone can incorporate anywhere for better communication, problem-solving and decision-making. This ground-breaking approach promises to reduce tension and conflict wherever it’s employed. The Collaborative Path has the potential to create important and far-reaching societal change.

Collaborative decision making processes are a form of communication inside organizations. Their functioning can teach lessons for the design of electronic office systems. Those processes are open ended and therefore decide themselves on their form. Like oral deliberations which cannot be modelled in advance any open ended communication process needs means for common control over the further advancement and the ending of the process. The history of German administrative practice and its special methods of using disposals for the control of common processes shows the creation of records as based on communication needs generated by the intention of joint actions. For electronic decision making processes the purposes remain the same, but the means have to follow the effects of electronic communication on messages. The book is a reworked English version of a thesis for the official qualification for university professorship accepted by the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer. Germany.

This publication presents the latest innovations and achievements of academic communities on Decision Support Systems (DSS). These advances include theory systems, computer-aided methods, algorithms, techniques and applications related to supporting decision making. The aim is to develop approaches for applying information systems technology to increase the effectiveness of decision making in situations where the computer system can support and enhance human judgements in the performance of tasks that have elements which cannot be specified in advance. Also it is intended to improve ways of synthesizing and applying relevant work from resource disciplines to practical implementation of systems that enhance decision support capability. The resource disciplines include: information technology, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, decision theory, organizational theory, operations research and modeling. Researchers come from the Operational Research area but also from Decision Theory, Multicriteria Decision Making methodologies, Fuzzy sets and modeling tools. Based on the introduction of Information and Communication Technologies in organizations, the decisional process is evolving from a mono actor to a multi actor situation in which cooperation is a way to make the decision.

Decision-making has evolved recently thanks to the introduction of information and communication technologies in many organizations, which has led to new kinds of decision-making processes, called “collaborative decision-making”, at the organizational and cognitive levels. This book looks at the development of the decision-making process in organizations. Decision-aiding and its paradigm of problem solving are defined, showing how decision-makers now need to work in a cooperative way. Definitions of cooperation and associated concepts such as collaboration and coordination are given and a framework of cooperative decision support systems is presented, including intelligent DSS, cooperative knowledge-based systems, workflow, group support systems, collaborative engineering, integrating with a collaborative decision-making model in part or being part of global projects. Several models and experimental studies are also included showing that these new processes have to be supported by new types of tools, several of which are described in order to calculate or simulate solutions or global solutions for decision-making modification. Definitions and new trends for these models are given, along with types of systems. Contents 1. Alteration of Decision-Making Processes in Organizations. 2. New Decision-Making Processes. 3. The Need to Cooperate. 4. Cooperative Decision-Making. 5. Activity Support Systems. 6. Cooperative Decision Support Systems: CDSSS. About the Authors Pascale Zaraté is Professor at Toulouse 1 Capitole University, France. She conducts her research at the IRIT Laboratory and is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Decision Support Systems Technologies. She is co-chair of the European Working Group on DSS and has published several studies and books.