Antecedents of Leader Utilization of Staff Input in Decision-Making Teams

The purpose of this experiment was to explore the possibility that the inconsistent findings of Brehmer and Hagafors (1986, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 38, 181-195), Sniezek and Buckley (1995, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 62, 159-174), and leader-member exchange research regarding leaders' propensity to differentially and accurately weight staff input can be explained as a result of experience, the availability to the leader of staff member judgment confidence, and the cumulative past accuracy of each staff member. The availability to the team leader of staff member past judgment accuracy and staff member judgment confidence was provided in an environment in which differential staff weighting was the appropriate staff utilization strategy. Eighty-four leaders of four-person decision-making teams performed 63 decisions on a computerized decision-making task. Both experience and providing leaders with cumulative staff past accuracy information were related to greater staff weighting variability and greater staff weighting accuracy. Although positively related to staff weighting, staff confidence information did not improve leader weighting variability nor actual staff weighting accuracy. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.