Another Look at Group Size, Group Problem Solving, and Member Consensus.

Manners, George E.

doi:10.2307/255374

Cited by 21 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Their knowledge of the company is limited unless subsidiary and parent inside directors educate them. A further hypothesis is that seven to eleven directors are probably optimum given the research on small group effectiveness (Ziller, 1957;Manners, 1975).…”

Section: Written Policiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The increasing role of subsidiary boards in MNCs: An empirical study

Kriger

1988

Strategic Management Journal

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c Little research has been done to date on the role of subsidiary boards (SBs) in MNCs. A two-phase survey research design has yielded responses from 90 subsidiaries in 36 MNCs based in Europe, North America, and Japan. The sample provides evidence that: (1) SBs are perceived to be in transition from lesser to greater proactivity, and (2) MNCs with parent headquarters in North America, Europe, and Japan perceive the usefulness of these boardr in different ways. The results indicate an increasingly active use of these boards in selective advisory and strategic roles. Some recommendations are presented for CEOs, chairmen, and subsidiary directors who are interested in designing their SBs to take better advantage of already legally mandated, but often underutilized, structures. SBs are not a panacea for resolving tensions between parents and subsidiaries and for monitoring changes in host country environments; however, they can provide added strategic governance for subsidiaries .

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Section: Written Policiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The increasing role of subsidiary boards in MNCs: An empirical study

Kriger

1988

Strategic Management Journal

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“…The 'iron law of oligarchy' proposes that a key element is scalar stress, which describes the fact that the difficulty for a group to coordinate increases with group size [1]. This relation appears in (i) psychology experiments of collective decision-making, in which larger groups reach a lesser degree of agreement [14] or take worse decisions [15], and (ii) indirectly in anthropological data showing a strong correlation between group size and probability of group fission [16], or group size and the number of political units [17]. On one side of the range, small-whale hunters of Mackenzie Inuits have one single coach to coordinate group hunting [18].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From disorganized equality to efficient hierarchy: how group size drives the evolution of hierarchy in human societies

2020

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A manifest trend is that larger and more productive human groups shift from distributed to centralized decision-making. Voluntary theories propose that human groups shift to hierarchy to limit scalar stress, i.e. the increase in cost of organization as a group grows. Yet, this hypothesis lacks a mechanistic model to investigate the organizational advantage of hierarchy and its role on its evolution. To fill this gap, we describe social organization by the distribution of individuals’ capacity to influence others. We then integrate this formalization into models of social dynamics and evolutionary dynamics. First, our results demonstrate that hierarchy strongly reduces scalar stress, and that this benefit can emerge solely because leaders and followers differ in their capacity to influence others. Second, the model demonstrates that this benefit can be sufficient to drive the evolution of leader and follower behaviours and ultimately, the transition from small egalitarian to large hierarchical groups.

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“…These have pointed out that during decision-making, the quality of task solution increases with group size because larger groups have higher probability that someone will have pieces of information essential to the problem’s solution [76]. Nonetheless, as group’s size increases, the quality of the decision drops fast [72], [77]. Members see larger groups as too large for an effective task performance, having too much competition, disunity, disagreement [70], [71] and communicative difficulties that create stress on individuals [78].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Group Size and Scalar Stress by Logistic Regression from an Archaeological Perspective

Alberti¹

2014

PLoS ONE

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Johnson’s scalar stress theory, describing the mechanics of (and the remedies to) the increase in in-group conflictuality that parallels the increase in groups’ size, provides scholars with a useful theoretical framework for the understanding of different aspects of the material culture of past communities (i.e., social organization, communal food consumption, ceramic style, architecture and settlement layout). Due to its relevance in archaeology and anthropology, the article aims at proposing a predictive model of critical level of scalar stress on the basis of community size. Drawing upon Johnson’s theory and on Dunbar’s findings on the cognitive constrains to human group size, a model is built by means of Logistic Regression on the basis of the data on colony fissioning among the Hutterites of North America. On the grounds of the theoretical framework sketched in the first part of the article, the absence or presence of colony fissioning is considered expression of not critical vs. critical level of scalar stress for the sake of the model building. The model, which is also tested against a sample of archaeological and ethnographic cases: a) confirms the existence of a significant relationship between critical scalar stress and group size, setting the issue on firmer statistical grounds; b) allows calculating the intercept and slope of the logistic regression model, which can be used in any time to estimate the probability that a community experienced a critical level of scalar stress; c) allows locating a critical scalar stress threshold at community size 127 (95% CI: 122–132), while the maximum probability of critical scale stress is predicted at size 158 (95% CI: 147–170). The model ultimately provides grounds to assess, for the sake of any further archaeological/anthropological interpretation, the probability that a group reached a hot spot of size development critical for its internal cohesion.

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Another Look at Group Size, Group Problem Solving, and Member Consensus.

Cited by 21 publications

References 25 publications

The increasing role of subsidiary boards in MNCs: An empirical study

The increasing role of subsidiary boards in MNCs: An empirical study

From disorganized equality to efficient hierarchy: how group size drives the evolution of hierarchy in human societies

Modeling Group Size and Scalar Stress by Logistic Regression from an Archaeological Perspective

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