Majority Decision-Making Works Best Under Conditions of Leadership Ambiguity and Shared Task Representations

Leadership Research Summary:

• The effectiveness of decision-making teams depends largely on their ability to integrate and make sense of information. Consequently, teams which more often use majority decision-making may make better quality decisions, but particularly so when they also have task representations which emphasize the elaboration of information relevant to the decision, in the absence of clear leadership. In the present study we propose that (a) majority decision-making will be more effective when task representations are shared, and that (b) this positive effect will be more pronounced when leadership ambiguity (i.e., team members’ perceptions of the absence of a clear leader) is high.

• These hypotheses were put to the test using a sample comprising 81 teams competing in a complex business simulation for seven weeks. As predicted, majority decision-making was more effective when task representations were shared, and this positive effect was more pronounced when there was leadership ambiguity. The findings extend and nuance earlier research on decision rules, the role of shared task representations, and leadership clarity.

Leadership Research Implications and Findings:

• Prior research has found that clarity of leadership was especially important for larger teams in terms of innovation, probably because, in such teams, having a clear team leader prevented loss of coordination (West et al., 2003). Although a transformational team leader can indeed play a role in developing a shared vision and, in turn, promote team reflexivity (Schippers et al., 2008), the current study shows that under conditions of high majority decision-making, leadership ambiguity can be beneficial when shared task representations are also high. In other words, leadership ambiguity can be beneficial if teams have developed a shared understanding of what it takes to be successful and have opted for an equality-based majority decision rule. Managers should therefore consider under which circumstances the “leader decides” rule should apply, and under what conditions the majority rule might be more beneficial (cf. Hastie and Kameda, 2005). For instance, if teams decide to use a majority rule and they have a shared understanding of what the task entails, they would benefit from having a manager or leader that is less prominent or even absent.

• Theoretically, it should be noted that authority differentiation, or the extent to which all team members are involved in team decision-making processes (Hollenbeck et al., 2012), has some similarities to majority decision-making. However, in the context of the current study,researchers were especially interested in the rules that teams use to make decisions. Thus, while authority differentiation can be related to the process of decision-making, and the extent to which team members are involved in the process, teams can still choose a specific decision rule to make the actual decision. Future research could, therefore, focus on the role of authority differentiation that precedes decision-making.