An Empirical Study of Group Awareness Information in a Web-Based Group Decision Support System

Group awareness information is important information for group work. It represents group members’ roles and responsibilities, their positions on an issue, their status, and the state of various group processes. The group awareness information presented in this article is designed to capture group member activities and their behaviors in web-based collaborative work. In this article, group awareness information is represented with a visual display and consists of activity and availability information. The application of this proposed scheme is designed and implemented in a web-based group decision support system. This article reports on the results of a study that examined group performance on a given task in a web-based group decision support system with and without group awareness information. The study examined how group awareness information impacts the quality of the work effort and a given task, group decision making by members in the same group and different groups, the communications among group members in the completion of an online collaborative authoring task, the cohesiveness among group members in a web-based group decision support system, and the commitment/disposition of group engagement.