Reaching Consensus Isn’t Easy: A Classroom Role-Play on Team Decision-Making

Reaching consensus is often more difficult than it appears, particularly when teams must navigate competing priorities, incomplete information, and time pressure. This experiential role-play engages small groups in a team decision-making scenario in which committee members must reach a unanimous agreement on allocating a one-time $100,000 institutional grant. Structural funding thresholds embedded in the scenario prevent equal distribution, forcing genuine prioritization and deliberation. Role-based confidentiality constraints, analogous to non-disclosure agreements, introduce information asymmetry mirroring real organizational conditions. Grounded in bounded rationality, social interdependence theory, and intragroup conflict research, the exercise is designed for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in organizational behavior, human resource management, leadership, and strategy, as well as any course in which group decision-making is a central topic. A structured four-part debrief connects observed behavior to established theoretical concepts. The exercise runs in a single 45- to 60-min synchronous session and requires no advance student preparation.