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Why Limit Team Decisions to One Vote Per Person?

Multivoting, a form of ranked choice in business settings, allows for more and better options.

Written by:

Steven Rogelberg , Contributing Writer

Editor verified:

Shari Weiss,Senior Editor

Last Updated Oct 03, 2023

Business.com earns commissions from some listed providers. Editorial Guidelines.

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Dr. Steven Rogelberg is Chancellor’s Professor at UNC Charlotte and former president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Conducting a straw poll prior to a group decision can be a useful way of seeing where attendees stand. Data from the poll focuses conversations around solutions with the most support.

The most common poll is something called plurality voting: each attendee has one vote, and they assign it to one potential solution they find most compelling. However, another option called multivoting is showing better results, according to new research published in the Academy of Management Discoveries.

Multivoting Allows for Greater Nuance

In such a poll, each attendee gets, say, 10 votes — depending on the number of options being evaluated — that they can allocate across potential solutions. They can assign their votes any way they like. For example, they can allocate all 10 votes to one solution or perhaps five votes to a couple solutions they see as viable.

As noted, groups using multivoting outperformed groups using other approaches. This could be the case for several reasons:

Multivoting requires the attendee to think much harder about all the potential solutions and their relative value.
Potential solutions are less likely to just fall off the table (unless they receive zero votes, which is uncommon).
It gives the group a lot more data, and thus discussion can be broader and more inclusive.

Give multivoting a try. It works and is actually fun to do.

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Written by: Steven Rogelberg , Contributing Writer

Why Limit Team Decisions to One Vote Per Person?

Table of Contents

Multivoting Allows for Greater Nuance