Collective choice in virtual teams

Abstract

Virtual organisations within and across enterprise structures are becoming mature as a potentially effective means for goal-oriented business teamwork. Among the many support functions enabling efficient cooperation in teams, team decision-making is a very crucial one, but it does not find adequate support in contemporary team software solutions. Even the most knowledgeable results from collective choice theory are not reflected in the respective virtual team environments. This paper makes a systematic attempt to provide virtual teams with the power of voting procedures developed in the context of the theory of collective choice. A toolset called TEAMVOTE, for electronic decision-making, is presented, implementing a blend of the most important collective choice strategies, like the Dodgson rule, the majority rule, plurality voting, Borda counting, approval voting, the Nanson rule, the Hare rule, the Coomb rule, etc., based on standard Internet technology. The services of TEAMVOTE, which are targeted to support goal-oriented business teams in group decision matters, raise the perspective of its use to enable democratic processes on a societal scale.