A comparison of performance and satisfaction between two types of group decision support systems

Group Decision Support Systems (GDSSs) and other electronic meeting technologies have been developed to support or replace traditional, verbal meetings. While extensive research has been conducted regarding the impact of these systems on the group decision making process, the vast majority of these studies have focused on groups meeting fact-to-face in one room. This paper focuses on how group members perform when distributed as non-proximate sub-groups (virtual legislative sessions) as compared to proximate, face-to-face groups (synchronous legislative sessions). Experiments involving 12 groups of 10 members each showed that there were few significant differences in productivity and satisfaction between the two types of meeting formats. These and other results indicate that groups may operate productively in a virtual meeting environment