The Effect of Shared Mental Models on Consensus Triparna de Vreede, Roni Reiter-Palmon, Gert-Jan de Vreede The Center for Collaboration Science, University of Nebraska at Omaha tdevreede@unomaha.edu, rreiter-palmon@unomaha.edu, gdevreede@unomaha.edu Abstract Modern organizations are increasingly relying on teams to solve problems and make decisions. In order to effectively utilize teams, it is important to understand the conditions in which the team can function most efficiently. One of the conditions required to make team work successful is to ensure that there is consensus among the team members about the decisions made. Organizations consider consensus- based decision-making to be important because it has the potential to increase commitment and enable the successful execution of strategies. There are various factors that can have a bearing on consensus decision- making. This study focuses on one such factor that may influence team consensus - shared mental models. Specifically, this study explored if shared mental models had a positive relationship with the consensus decision making in groups. Results show that teams with higher shared mental models reached higher levels of consensus. In addition, it was discovered that perceptions of fairness in the decision-making process was the greatest contributor to difference between groups’ shared mental model scores. 1. Introduction Decision-making groups are ubiquitous in today’s organizations. They can be found in all facets of organizational life – from committees in universities and work teams in corporations to juries in court houses. Small groups are being used for decision- making because it is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for individuals to effectively solve the complex problems of our modern world [6, 31, 35]. Further, research shows that being in a productive team environment enables individuals to share their unique and critical perspectives and expertise more effectively, resulting in a more complete and effective solution [44, 45]. Therefore, many organizations are giving increasing importance to collaborative means and approaches and are using the expertise of groups to make decisions [3, 7, 14, 53]. There are many decision-making rules that can be utilized by the team-members to reach an agreement. One such decision-making rule is consensus decision- making [40]. Studies show that diverse groups and communities commonly use consensus decision- making methods [15, 47]. For example, consensus development conferences are also being hosted in the United States to enable researchers and organizations to benefit from the latest developments in the field. For example, the National Institute of Health has been organizing consensus conferences since 1977 to help resolve issues related to knowledge of healthcare [10]. Due to its popularity in a variety of group settings, the study of consensus has captured the attention of small group researchers [1, 18] and is the focus of this research study. The purpose of this study is to examine one of the antecedents of consensus – Shared Mental Models (SMMs). Next section will evaluate the consensus decision-making literature in order to justify the definition of consensus used in this study. In the succeeding section, the concept of shared mental models will be discussed. In the next section, the proposed model and hypothesis will be described. This will be followed by the results of the study. The final section will discuss the implication of the results and some future directions. 2. Background 2.1 Consensus A variety of definitions for consensus exist in the literature, and a universally accepted definition of consensus yet to evolve. A commonly accepted definition of consensus was proposed by Hare [15], who defined the construct as a decision that all group members are satisfied with and that incorporates all points of view. Differentiating majority vote from consensus, Hare explained that during voting, the group makes decisions on issues that require gathering information or exercising power, whereas consensus requires the group to ensure that all individual members agree on common values. Another widely used definition of consensus was proposed by Schweiger, Sandberg, and Rechner [48]. 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1530-1605/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2013.517 262 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1530-1605/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2013.517 263