Using priming games and multi-step processes to improve virtual team decision making

Virtual teams are prevalent in today's businesses. Virtual teams have different interactions than face-to-face teams because they rely on information communication technologies (ICT), which can impede certain human cognitive processes. Prior research has found that although more information is shared using ICT, poor decisions often result. Potential culprits include team members not reading others' comments and not contributing the unique information they know. My dissertation proposes two ways to improve the team decision-making process and decision quality. First, drawing from cognitive psychology, I propose that playing a computer game designed to induce subconscious regret priming before the decision-making task will improve team member desire to read and consider others' information and therefore team performance. Second, I propose that a multi-step decision-making process broken up into three parts (contributing information, reading other's information, and discussion) will reduce dual task interference and cognitive overload, which will also improve information processing abilities and team performance.;Results found the multi-step decision making process to significantly improve team decision-making. This suggests a need for design science to develop communication tools that are conducive to specific tasks during the decision-making process. This research shows that decisions suffer if time is not allowed for each part of the process to take place. This finding is an important take-away for managers who use virtual teams since a need has been identified for task-related communication tools. For ideal virtual team communications, managers need to be prepared to use different communication tools to improve each process involved in a particular task.;Priming was not found to significantly improve team decision-making in this study. More research is needed to determine what went wrong with the prime. This study used regret prime, which has been found to be successful during the individual decision-making process. It follows that this prime should have also been successful in team situations. Since regret was found not to be successful in team decision making, is possible that a different type of prime is needed. Though doubtful, it is also possible that primes are not successful in team interactions. Thus, more research is needed to determine the effect of priming in teams.