The Effect of Total-Identification on the Performance of Computer-Mediated Group Idea Generation

Results of more than three decades of research have provided evidence that computer-based idea generation is more than a management fashion. However, given that the performance of computer-based groups when compared to that of (paper-and-penciled-based) nominal groups did not yield substantial productivity differences regardless of group sizes and other factors, computer-based idea generation appears to be another management fad. One reason for such productivity paradox stems from the absence of clear task performance information because all contributions are generically anonymous, inducing social loafing and downward productivity matching – a tendency of productivity matching to a perceived baseline. Prior studies introduced a real-time performance feedback mechanism as an external intervention to combat process losses due to anonymity of comments. Despite a significant performance improvement, we observed a consistent limitation that is the tendency of performance competitiveness from quality to quantity toward later stages of the idea generation session. In this study, we introduced a situational factor, i.e., individuals’ real names as an additional external intervention variable to increase the degree of identifiability and evaluability of individual outputs, while maintaining the same quantity feedback. The results showed that (1) expected statistical significances were yielded for both quantity and quality of ideas and (2) performance competitiveness did not diminish throughout the idea generation session in the total-Identification condition. However, given that the magnitude of the effect of total-identification when compared to the effect of pseudonymity on ideation performance doesn’t seem large enough, a pursuit of further research to identify factors that could reinforce the effect of total-identification is necessary. The results also showed that individuals’ real names in conjunction with performance feedback did not have an effect on reducing the number of junk comments. The notions of face-saving and comments filtering are suggested to fine-tune the interface of computer-based idea generation.