Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2002. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Innovation and creativity are established research areas but both are relatively new research areas within the field of organisational psychology. Early research on innovation and creativity were primarily the focus area of academics in related social sciences disciplines. Research on innovation and creativity was integrated with the orientations and perspectives of organisational psychologists over a period of time. In other words the development and identification of innovation as a success factor of the work environment is something that took place over decades. Changes in the competitive environment over the last few decades contributed to the increasing interest in the concept of innovation. Today managers recognise innovation as a necessity that needs to be managed and developed. Three levels of analyses (the individual, group and organisation) can be identified in the innovation literature. Until recently researchers focused primarily on the individual and the organisation as units of analysis. As a results of this, research that focuses on the individual and the organisation are quite comprehensive compared to studies that focus on the group as a unit of analysis. The utilisation of teams have increased in organisations, but our knowledge of the factors and dimensions that determine group innovation are still restricted. The complex nature of group innovation could perhaps be a contributing factor in terms of the amount of research studies that have been done on group innovation. It is especially in this regard that this study sets out to thoroughly investigate existing group innovation literature and to combine this with an investigation into the possible contributions of related social psychological research (for example group decision making, intragroup conflict and creative problem solving) to the innovation literature. Each one of the three units of analysis (individual, group and organisation) has a unique impact on group innovation, but not one of them explains exclusively the innovativeness of a team. An interdependent relationship exists between these factors. This stresses the complexity of the concept and as a result of this, researchers are encouraged to investigate the possible contributions of related social psychological themes to the innovation research and literature. In this regard this study focused extensively on a input, process and output model of group innovation by West and Anderson (1996) to determine to what extend some of the aspects of the model explained the innovativeness of a group. This is a comprehensive model and for the purposes of this study only certain aspects of the model were included in the research process. The size of the team and team tenure were the two input elements that were included in the study. The process elements of the model includes clarity and commitment to team objectives, participation, task orientation and support for innovation. In terms of the output aspects of the model the focus was on the following: how radical, effective, new and extensive the innovation is, as well as the number of innovations per team. The results of the study indicate that there are a relationship between the variables of West and Anderson's input, process and output model (1996) and the innovativeness of the team. The results of this study indicate that the model by West and Anderson is a valuable contribution to the research literature on group innovation behaviour. Although group innovation has not been researched extensively, it seems that group innovation is starting to make an impact on the organisational psychology domain and that it will be a central aspect of the research agenda of organisational psychologists in future. If we are able to establish a sound theoretical basis organisations will be able to understand and predict group innovation behaviour. It can be concluded that this study made a contribution to the research literature on group innovation behaviour in terms of an awareness of the impact and necessity of innovation in today's work environment, and also in extending the existing knowledge base of group innovation behaviour / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Alhoewel innovasie al VIr 'n geruime tyd as navorsingsdomein gevestig IS, het organisasiesielkundiges eers redelik onlangs aan innovasie en kreatiwiteit begin aandag skenk. Een van die redes waarom dit so lank geneem het voordat innovasie as 'n waardige wetenskaplike navorsingsonderwerp besef was, was die feit dat vroeëre navorsing oor hierdie onderwerp deur akademici in ander sosiaal wetenskaplike dissiplines uitgevoer was. Die integrering van sodanige navorsing met organisasiesielkundiges se perspektiewe en oriëntasies het skynbaar slegs met verloop van tyd plaasgevind. Die ontwikkeling van innovasie as 'n verskynsel van die werksomgewing het dus stelselmatig oor dekades heen plaasgevind. Die impak van omgewingsveranderinge op organisasies het ook oor die afgelope paar dekades beduidende belangstelling ten opsigte van innovasie ontsluit. Innovasie, as 'n komponent van organisatoriese-kompeterendheid en -effektiwiteit, is vandag 'n noodsaaklikheid wat toenemend deur hedendaagse bedryfsleiers ondersteun en bestuur word. Binne die werksomgewing kom innovasie op drie verskillende vlakke (die individu, die groep en die organisasie) voor. Tot dusver het innovasienavorsers egter in hoofsaak op die individu en organisasie as ontledingseenheid gefokus. Navorsing wat die individu of organisasie as ontledingseenheid gebruik, is volop in vergelyking met studies wat die groep as ontledingseenheid gebruik. Met ander woorde, alhoewel die gebruikmaking van spanne in organisasies toeneem, is ons kennis van die faktore en dimensies wat spaninnoverendheid bepaal, steeds beperk. Die beperkte teoretiese basis van bestaande groepinnovasienavorsing kan deels aan die omvangryke en komplekse aard van die verskynsel toegeskryf word. Dit is juis in hierdie opsig dat hierdie studie dit ten doel gestel het om bestaande groepinnovasieliteratuur deeglik te ondersoek en om vas te stel tot watter mate verwante sosiaal-sielkundige navorsing (onder andere groepbesluitneming, intragroepkonflik en kreatiewe probleemoplossing) 'n bydrae tot die innovasieliteratuur kan lewer. Elk van die drie ontledingsvlakke (individu, groep, organisasie) het 'n unieke effek op die innoverendheid van 'n span, maar nie een van hierdie kategorieë verklaar uitsluitlik die innoverendheid van 'n span nie. Die interafhanklike verhouding van hierdie faktore beklemtoon die kompleksiteit van die verskynsel en dit moedig toekomstige navorsers aan om die nuttige bydraes van verwante sosiaal-sielkundige temas te ondersoek. In hierdie verband is daar ook breedvoerig gebruik gemaak van 'n inset, proses en uitset model van groepinnoverendheid deur West en Anderson (1996), ten einde vas te stel tot watter mate sekere aspekte van die model die innoverendheid van 'n span voorspel. Vanweë die omvangrykheid van die model is slegs sekere veranderlikes in die navorsing ingesluit. In terme van die insette is daar op grootte en spandienstydperk gefokus. Die proses faset van die model verwys na die duidelikheid en verbondenheid tot doelwitte, deelname, taakoriëntasie en ondersteuning vir innovasie. Ten opsigte van die uitset faset van die model is daar op die volgende aspekte gefokus: die radikaalheid, omvangrykheid, nuutheid en effektiwiteit van die innovasie asook die getal innovasie items binne die groep. Die resultate van die studie dui daarop dat daar wel 'n verband tussen hierdie veranderlikes van West en Anderson (1996) se model en die innoverendheid van groepe bestaan. Hierdie model van groepinnoverendheid blyk vanuit die resultate van hierdie studie, en vorige studies, nuttig te wees vir die bestudering van groepinnovasiegedrag. Alhoewel daar tot dusver min lig gewerp is op die faktore wat groepinnoverendheid bepaal, wil dit voorkom asof groepinnovasienavorsing 'n sentrale faset van die organisasiesielkunde se navorsingsagenda in die toekoms sal wees. Die vestiging en uitbreiding van 'n teoretiese basis salorganisasies in staat stelom die innovasiegedrag van spanne beter te verstaan en te voorspel. Ten slotte kan dit vermeld word dat hierdie studie In bydrae gelewer het tot groepinnovasiegedrag, nie net in terme van 'n bewusmaking van die impak en noodsaaklikheid van innovasie in die hedendaagse werksomgewing nie, maar ook in terme van die uitbreiding van die bestaande kennisbasis oor groepinnovasiegedrag.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Decision making is crucial for enterprises, being frequently done by groups. However, the way information is shared among groups, as well as the complexity of the task being analyzed might affect the quality of group decision. Thus, the following research aims to identify how information sharing and task complexity influence on group decision. Besides, it is aimed to (a) validate a decisive task related to information sharing and task complexity; b) verify the way information sharing affects taking decisions in groups and; c) illustrate the effect of task complexity in group decisive process. Four hypotheses were drawn in order to corroborate these objectives. The methodology applied was an almost-experimental research conducted in a laboratory, having as independent variables the information sharing and task complexity; and as a dependent variable, group decision. In order to contemplate those variables, the applied task has been adapted from Stasser and Stewart (1992) and Fraidin (2004), and is denominated Murder Mystery . This task went through a process of reverse translation, cultural adaptation, and two validations corroborating the first specific objective of this research. It was used a system for data collection developed specifically for the experiment, STAR Individual x SER Grupo . Besides, group discussions were followed by observers previously trained and recorded for further analysis. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted. The number of undergraduate students taking part in the experiment was 144. Concerning specific objectives, it was observed that there were no differences between the quality of the decision from both groups, independently of the type of information sharing, good decisions were taken. Fisher s test has been applied to the decisions with total and partial sharing. It was also compared the decisions taken by groups that mad a simple task and the ones of a complex one, with no statistically significance for Fisher s test, leading to the fact that there is no difference between the quality of the decision taken by groups that made a simple task and groups that made complex ones. However, the more a task is complex; the less information is discussed by a member of the group, jeopardizing decision making. All the research objectives were reached. In a general sense, through testing four hypotheses, there was no influence of information sharing and task complexity in group decision, opposing a great part of the literature, indicating that more studies on this topic are necessary. / O ato de decidir é crucial para as empresas, sendo freqüente que grupos o realizem. Entretanto, a forma como a informação é compartilhada entre os membros do grupo, bem como o grau de complexidade da tarefa que está sendo analisada podem afetar a qualidade da decisão grupal. Dessa forma, esta pesquisa visa identificar como o compartilhamento da informação e a complexidade da tarefa influenciam a decisão em grupo. Além disso, ainda busca-se (a) validar uma tarefa decisória relacionada ao compartilhamento de informações e a complexidade da tarefa; b) verificar como o compartilhamento de informações afeta a tomada de decisão em grupo e; c) ilustrar o efeito da complexidade da tarefa no processo decisório grupal. Quatro hipóteses foram traçadas a fim de corroborar esses objetivos. Como metodologia de investigação realizou-se um quase-experimento em laboratório, tendo como variáveis independentes o compartilhamento da informação e a complexidade da tarefa, e como variável dependente a decisão em grupo. Para contemplar essas variáveis, a tarefa aplicada foi adaptada de Stasser e Stewart (1992) e Fraidin (2004), e denomina-se Mistério do Assassinato . Essa tarefa passou por um processo de tradução reversa, adaptação cultural e duas validações corroborando ao primeiro objetivo específico deste trabalho. Para a aplicação da mesma foi utilizado um sistema de coleta de dados desenvolvido especificamente para este experimento, o STAR Individual x SER Grupo. Além disso, as discussões dos grupos foram acompanhadas por observadores previamente treinados e gravadas para posterior análise. Foram realizadas análises quantitativa e qualitativa dos dados. Ao total participaram do experimento 144 estudantes de graduação. Com relação do aos objetivos específicos, observou-se, através do Teste de Fisher aplicado às decisões tomadas pelos grupos com compartilhamento total e parcial, que não houve diferenças entre a qualidade da decisão de ambos os grupos, sendo que independentemente do tipo de compartilhamento da informação boas decisões foram tomadas. Também se comparou as decisões tomadas pelos grupos que realizaram a tarefa simples e os que realizaram a tarefa complexa, não encontrando significância estatística para o Teste de Fisher, indicando não haver diferença entre a qualidade da decisão tomada pelos grupos que realizaram tarefas simples e os grupos que realizaram tarefas complexas. Entretanto, verificou-se que quanto maior a complexidade da tarefa menor número de informações discutidas pelo membro do grupo, o que pode prejudicar a tomada de decisão. Todos os objetivos da pesquisa foram atingidos. De um modo geral, a partir do teste de quatro hipóteses, não se verificou influência do compartilhamento da informação e da complexidade da tarefa na decisão em grupo, contrariando grande parte da literatura, o que indica que mais estudos acerca dessa temática tornam-se necessários.

Lorsqu’ils travaillent en équipe, les humains ont rarement des comportements optimaux : ils peuvent faire des erreurs, manquer de motivation ou de compétence. Dans les domaines des environnements virtuels ou des systèmes multi-agents, de nombreux travaux ont cherché à reproduire les comportements d’équipes humaines : un agent représente alors un membre de l’équipe. Cependant, ces travaux ont très souvent pour objectif la performance de l’équipe, et non la fidélité des comportements produits. Pour former un apprenant en environnement virtuel à prêter attention et à s’adapter aux autres, nous avons cherché dans cette thèse à reproduire des comportements humains réalistes et non-optimaux de travail d’équipe. Plus particulièrement, nous nous sommes intéressés aux équipes auto-organisées, c’est-à-dire aux équipes dans lesquelles le pouvoir de décision est réparti entre les membres, et dans lesquelles l’organisation est implicite. Dans de telles équipes, l’organisation se fait non pas au travers des communications mais par l’observation et l’anticipation des comportements des autres. Pour s’organiser, chaque agent doit se demander ce qu’il est préférable de faire en fonction de ce que pourraient faire les autres, et donc se poser des questions telles que Ai-je confiance en la compétence de mon coéquipier pour faire cette tâche ? Les relations de confiance permettent donc à chacun de prendre en compte les autres. Pour générer de tels comportements, nous proposons un système permettant aux agents de raisonner d’une part sur un modèle de l’activité à effectuer et d’autre part sur les relations de confiance qui les lient aux autres agents de l’environnement. Dans ce cadre, notre première contribution porte sur l’augmentation du langage de description de l’activité Activity-DL de manière à permettre la description d’activités collectives. Nous proposons également des mécanismes de propagation de contraintes et d’informations qui faciliteront le raisonnement des agents. Ces contraintes et informations permettront par exemple aux agents de répondre à la question Avons-nous les compétences nécessaires pour faire la tâche qui permettra de réaliser notre but collectif ? Notre seconde contribution porte sur la proposition d’un modèle d’agent opérationnalisant le modèle de confiance de Mayer et al. (1995), sélectionné après une étude de la littérature en sciences humaines et sociales sur la confiance. La confiance d’un agent en un autre est décrite selon trois dimensions : l’intégrité, la bienveillance et les compétences. Chaque agent est donc défini par ces trois dimensions et a des croyances sur l’intégrité, la bienveillance et la compétence des autres agents. De plus chaque agent possède des buts qui lui sont personnels ainsi que des buts collectifs et devra donc choisir quel but privilégier. Finalement nous proposons un moteur décisionnel qui permet à chaque agent de calculer l’importance qu’il accorde à ses buts afin de sélectionner une tâche. Nous avons défini les mécanismes de calcul de l’importance des buts de manière à modéliser l’influence sur l’agent de ses croyances sur les autres, et pour sélectionner une tâche, l’agent raisonne à la fois sur les modèles d’activité et sur ses attentes à propos du comportement des autres, également générées à partir des croyances de l’agent sur les autres. Nous avons implémenté notre système et constaté qu’il répond à nos objectifs de génération de comportements d’équipe réalistes et non optimaux. Nous avons également conduit une évaluation perceptive préliminaire au cours de laquelle les participants ont notamment été capables de percevoir la confiance ou le manque de confiance d’un agent en un autre grâce à son comportement. / When working in teams, humans rarely display optimal behaviors: they sometimes make mistakes, lack motivation or competence. In virtual environments or in multi-agent systems, many studies have tried to reproduce human teamwork: each agent acts as a team member. However, the main objective in those studies is the performance of the team: each agent should display optimal behavior, and the realism of those simulated behaviors is not a concern. To train someone in a virtual environment to pay attention to and to adapt to their teammates, we built a decision-making system for agents to display realistic and non-optimal behaviors. More specifically, we are interested in self-organized teams (i.e. teams where the decision power is decentralized among its members) and in implicit organization (i.e. when team members do not interact through communications but rather through the observation of others’ behaviors). In such a team, each agent has to think about what it should do given what others could do. Agents then have to ask themselves questions such as Do I trust my teammate’s competence to perform this task? Trust relationships therefore allow agents to take others into account. We propose a system that allows agents to reason, on the first hand, on models of the activity they have to do, and on the other hand, on trust relationships they share with others. In that context, we first augmented the Activity-Description Language so that it supports the description of collective activities. We also defined mechanisms for constraint generation that facilitates agent reasoning, by giving them the answer to questions like Do we have the required abilities to perform the task which will achieve our goal? We then proposed an agent model based on the model of interpersonal trust of Mayer et al. (1995) that we selected after a study of trust in social science. This model describes trust relationship with three dimensions: the trustor trusts the trustee’s integrity, benevolence and abilities. An agent is therefore defined through those three dimensions, and has a mental model of each other agent; i.e. has trust beliefs about others’ integrity, benevolence and abilities. Moreover each agent has both personal and collective goals (i.e. goals that are shared with other members of the team), and thus will have to decide which goal to focus on. Finally we proposed a decision-making system that allows an agent to compute the importance it gives to its goals and then to select a task. When computing goal importance, the agent is influenced by its trust beliefs about others, and to select a task, it reasons on the activity models and on its expectations about what others could do. Those expectations are generated from the agents’ trust beliefs. We implemented our system and observed that it produces realistic and non-optimal behaviors. We also conducted a preliminary perceptive evaluation which showed that participants were able to recognize one agent’s trust or lack of trust in another through the behaviors of the first one.

Written and oral second language pedagogy have undergone a major shift from the traditional focus on form and end-product to a focus on the process of creating meaning. However, recent research indicates that a reliance on process alone is insufficient, and that specific linguistic and knowledge-related demands must be made within a process if second language learners are to develop proficiency in oral and written expository discourse. Interactive decision-making activities in the classroom may present such demands, but the pre-constructed, somewhat artificial tasks typically included in adult ESL classes are generally directed toward the limited goal of stimulating more talk, without verifying their value for generating the language that is cognitively linked to decision-making. While collaborative revision of compositions has been used to aid decision-making during writing, its potential as a language learning activity has not previously been explored. The current study examines collaborative revision of compositions as a tool for eliciting oral decision-making language in the ESL classroom. Eight adult ESL students participated in two collaborative composition-related tasks and two interactive "constructed decision" activities. Using repeated measures ANOVA, the composition related activities were found to be at least as effective as the constructed decision activities for eliciting decision-making language as measured by five categories of decision-making moves. Qualitative examination of the discourse indicated that the composition activities also offer a context for conscious reinforcement of principles of grammar and rhetoric. The present results indicate that this activity may offer a natural alternative to pre-constructed decision-making tasks, and in doing so provides a context for the integration of oral and written language learning. In addition, by evaluating the discourse of activities in language terms, this research may help provide a bridge between processes and products not only for writing but for communicative language teaching. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

Real-time conferencing and collaborative computing is a great way to make developers more effective. This project is a collaborative framework development comprising configurable client and server components.

A novel approach was used to investigate differences between groups using computer-mediated and face-to-face communication. In a laboratory setting, three-person groups completed three survival themed tasks. The tasks were related in that the output of a preliminary task became the input of the sequent task.

Challenges in global politics like climate change, maritime piracy and fighting highly contagious diseases concern global public goods. The related policy decisions are mostly made by teams. In contrast, economic models of global public goods typically assume a single rational decision-maker. We use a laboratory experiment to compare team decisions to decisions of individuals in a finitely repeated public good game with and without a costly punishment option. Teams of three participants coordinate on decisions either by majority or unanimity rule. We find that in absence of a punishment option teams contribute more to the public good than individuals. With a punishment option subsequently to the contribution decision team treatments exhibit a less frequent use of anti-social punishment and lower levels of social as well as anti-social punishment. Extreme preferences for punishment are eliminated by the majority decision rule. Overall, team decisions are closer to the social optimum and teams yield higher net payoffs when compared to individuals.

The objective of this research is to establish consistency thresholds linked to alpha (α) levels for HDM’s (Hierarchical Decision Model) judgment quantification method. Measuring consistency in order to control it is a crucial and inseparable part of any AHP/HDM experiment. The researchers on the subject recommend establishing thresholds that are statistically based on hypothesis testing, and are linked to the number of decision variables and (α) level. Such thresholds provide the means with which to evaluate the soundness and validity of an AHP/HDM decision. The linkage of thresholds to (α) levels allows the decision makers to set an appropriate inconsistency tolerance compatible with the situation at hand. The measurements of judgments are unreliable in the absence of an inconsistency measure that includes acceptable limits. All of this is essential to the credibility of the entire decision making process and hence is extremely useful for practitioners and researchers alike. This research includes distribution fitting for the inconsistencies. It is a valuable and interesting part of the research results and adds usefulness, practicality and insight. The superb fits obtained give confidence that all the statistical inferences based on the fitted distributions accurately reflect the HDM’s inconsistency measure.

Challenges addressed in global politics, such as climate change, maritime piracy and fighting highly contagious diseases, concern global public goods. The related policy decisions are primarily made by teams. In contrast, economic models of global public goods typically assume a single rational decision maker. We use a laboratory experiment to compare team decisions to the decisions of individuals in a finitely repeated public goods game with and without a costly punishment option. Teams of three participants coordinate on decisions either by majority or unanimity rule. We find that, in the absence of a punishment option, teams deciding by the unanimity rule contribute slightly more than individuals. With the punishment option, unanimity teams choose significantly lower levels of punishment and exhibit anti-social punishment less frequently than individuals. A possible explanation is the elimination of extreme preferences for punishment through the coordination process in teams.

Since the inception of AI research, great strides have been made towards achieving the goal of extending natural language conversation as a medium of interaction with machines. Today, we find many Conversational Agents (CAs) situated in various aspects of our everyday life such as information access, education and entertainment. However, most of the existing work on CAs has focused on agents that support only one user in each interactive session. On the other hand, people organize themselves in groups such as teams of co-workers, family and networks of friends. With the mass-adoption of Internet based communication technologies for group interaction, there is an unprecedented opportunity for CAs to support interactive situations involving multiple human participants. Support provided by these CAs can make the functioning of some of these groups more efficient, enjoyable and rewarding to the participants. Through our work on supporting various Multi-Party Interactive Situations (MPIS), we have identified two problems that must be addressed in order to embed effective CAs in such situations. The first problem highlights the technical challenges involving the development of CAs in MPIS. Existing approaches for modeling agent behavior make assumptions that break down in multi-party interaction. As a step towards addressing this problem, this thesis contributes the Basilica software architecture that uses an event-driven approach to model conversation as an orchestration of triggering of conversational behaviors. This architecture alleviates the technical problems by providing a rich representational capability and the flexibility to address complex interaction dynamics. The second problem involves the choice of appropriate agent behaviors. In MPIS, agents must compete with human participants for attention in order to effectively deliver support and interventions. In this work, we follow a model of human group interaction developed by empirical research in small group communication. This model identifies two fundamental processes in human group interaction, i.e., Instrumental (Task-related) and Expressive (Social-Emotional). Behaviors that constitute this expressive process hold the key to managing and regulating user attention and serve other social functions in group interaction. This thesis describes two socially capable conversational agents that support users in collaborative learning and group decision making activities. Their social capabilities are composed of a set of behaviors based on the Social-Emotional interaction categories identified by work in small group communication. These agents demonstrate the generalizability of our methodology for designing and implementing social capabilities across two very different interactive situations. In addition to the implementation of these agents, the thesis presents a series of experiments and analysis conducted to investigate the effectiveness of these social capabilities. First and foremost, these experiments show significant benefits of the use of socially capable agents on task success and agent perception across the two different interactive situations listed above. Second, they investigate issues related to the appropriate use of these social capabilities specifically in terms of the amount and timing of the constituent social behaviors. Finally, these experiments provide an understanding of the underlying mechanism that explains the effects that social capabilities can achieve.