Decision making performance of interacting groups: an experimental investigation of the effects of task type and communication mode

Research on the effectiveness of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has begun to explore the interaction between task type and communication mode. This study investigates the interaction between communication process goals and communication modes using teams with a shared history performing two tasks: idea-generation, requiring the conveyance of information, and problem-solving, requiring convergence on the best solution. Results reveal a significant interaction between communication mode and communication process goals. When the goal of the communication process was conveyance of information, CMC teams and face-to-face teams performed equally well. However, when the communication process goal involved convergence, face-to-face communication resulted in better performance than CMC.