Attention and organizations

The concept of bounded rationality offers a new perspective on the study of groups and teams that moves beyond traditional group research. As a signature characteristic, group research that subscribes to the approach of bounded rationality focuses on the match between group strategies and characteristics of both the information and social environment. Historically, group research has often focused on group performance and productivity. The history of group research using outcome and performance measures is, by and large, a history of demonstrating group failure. This chapter illustrates how the concept of bounded rationality can broaden our view on process losses. The bounded rationality perspective suggests that some failures and process losses in groups that are described in the literature are limited to information environments that have been used in laboratory experiments. Some process losses observed in lab experiments may result from behaviors that are otherwise adaptive in information environments that groups encounter outside of the lab.