An empirical study of group awareness information in web-based group decision support system in a field test setting

Group awareness information is important information for group work. It represents things such as group members' roles and responsibilities, their positions on an issue, their status, and the state of various group processes that group members know about when they work together. 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. It 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 (GDSS) with and without group awareness information in a field test setting. In particular, 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 engagement of each member of the group.