for sir toney

Your assignment is to write an integrated summary suing four of these texts to describe the steps or components and potential problem in the process of successful group decision-making.

The outline will be organized by intro, body a b c d, and conclusion.

In the integrated summary, you will describe some components of successful group decision-making. To do this, you will use information and ideas from the four (or more) sources that you choose to use. You must use Mount Holyoke. The integrated summary is basically a form of research essay: it will present your interpretation of how the information and ideas should be combined to describe the process.

1. Therefore, the integrated summary begins with an introduction paragraph similar to the kind that begins an essay. It does not begin by naming all the authors and article titles. For example,

Decision-making by a group of disparate members is complex. This complexity consists of several aspects, one of which is how decisions should be made. How decisions should be made depends, in turn, on who is ultimately responsible for making the decision, and this varies among groups. Consensus decision-making seems to be one of the current popular choices. Nevertheless, even in cases where the consensus style is not utilized, the recommended techniques for decision-making are often similar to those taken in consensus decision-making.

After the introduction, you then discuss the topic aspect by aspect. Each subsequent paragraph begins with your idea (and not with an idea taken directly from a source). That is, the organization of your summary is determined by you and by the components you think are part of the process.

Discussions of the decision-making process typically refer to it in the context of problem-

solving. Thus, a critical step is identifying and understanding the problem. For example, … [ here, a

source is used to provide the first example of seeing problem-ID as crucial; this discussion may

include or be immediately followed by the topic of how to identify a problem correctly]

2. For each stage or component, you must then summarize relevant information or ideas from the sources. Whenever you do this, you must attribute the idea or information by citing the author/authors by last name only – or in the case of “Skill Building – Group Decision Making” you will use Mount Holyoke. You include the names either in parentheses after the information, or as part of the sentence itself. You should also include the year of publication the first time you cite the source. Note that in the first example, two sources are cited, separated by a semi-colon.

Examples:

One of these important factors is dissent (Phillips, 2014; Mount Holyoke, 2011 ).

Long (2015) makes the case that extended discussion allows for the growth of more accurate perspectives, while Levine and Stark (2015) also advocate for interaction as beneficial in finding errors.

(Reminder – the two examples above are not topic sentences. Topic sentences will be your idea, and thus will not include citation. The above examples are sentences that might follow a topic sentence.)

The names and dates to use:

Levine and Stark, 2015; Loftus, 2013; Long, 2015; Mount Holyoke, 2011; Phillips, 2014; Rutkin, 2015

3. Remember that each stage/phase/aspect/component should be supported by at least two examples from two different sources.

One of the important aspects of successful group decision-making is the extent to which group members are able to engage in creative brainstorming. Mount Holyoke makes it clear that this early generation of ideas is to be distinct from the later evaluation of ideas. Loftus (2013) goes so far as to say that being overly concerned about excellence at this point could diminish creativity. She further states that…

The idea of creativity arises as well in discussions of ….

(Three notes about the above example: (1) there is no date after Mount Holyoke but there is one after Loftus; this

signifies that Mount Holyoke has been cited before but that this is the first time for Loftus. (2) Notice that terms are

defined, since terms are not clear to the summary reader without some help from the summary writer. (3)Also, do you notice again here that the topic sentences don’t include citation?)

4. You must write your own conclusion to the summary. This should be a short paragraph in which you briefly recapitulate your “picture” of the decision-making components.