Collective decisions: which information stays out of the discussion?
In the “Management complexe” programme at SHR — Swiss Human Resources, collective decision-making deserves examination beyond the question of consensus. The precise question is this: how can managers prevent a decision from relying mainly on information that everyone already knows?
What the literature establishes
Garold Stasser and William Titus (1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) showed experimentally that group discussions can favour information initially shared by members over information held by only one member. In their decision tasks, this dynamic could prevent the group from identifying the option favoured by the full set of available information. Bringing knowledge holders together is therefore not enough to pool their knowledge.
Speaking up is another condition
Amy Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) observed an association between psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Psychological safety here means a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. This research sheds light on a complementary condition: holding useful information and being able to express it without fear are different things.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that a supportive climate is enough to produce better decisions. These studies do not establish this: allowing people to speak guarantees neither that unshared information will surface nor that it will be examined when deciding. Managers need to distinguish agreement from the actual coverage of information that could change the choice. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
Information-sharing experiments use controlled tasks and information distributions that differ from some evolving industrial decisions. The psychological safety study is field research and cannot, on its own, establish causality. Neither study demonstrates that a particular protocol would automatically improve decisions in a Fribourg company.
A practical check in Fribourg
As an applied exercise within the programme, a Fribourg agri-food company operating in a bilingual industrial environment and connected to the university sector could examine a process decision involving production, quality and a scientific partner. Before the discussion, each participant independently records information that could change the choice, in their working language; a bilingual summary identifies information mentioned by only one person. The proposed measure is the proportion of these items whose examination is explicitly documented in the final rationale, stating how they were taken into account or why they were rejected. This indicator checks the decision's information coverage, not its correctness, and enables comparison with subsequent decisions of the same kind. To go further: explore the Complex Management training in Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Complex Management in Fribourg
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