The generalized spatial modulation (GSM) is a new transmission technique that can realize high-performance multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems with a low RF complexity. This paper presents an efficient sphere decoding method used to perform the symbol detection for the generalized spatial modulation (GSM) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In the proposed method, the cost metric is modified so that it does not include the cancellation of the nonexistent interference. The modified cost metric can be computed by formulating a detection tree that has a regular structure representing the transmit antenna combinations as well as the symbol vectors, both of which are detected efficiently by finding the shortest path on the basis of an efficient tree search algorithm. As the tree search algorithm is performed for the regular detection tree to compute the modified but mathematically-equivalent cost metric, the efficiency of the sphere decoding is improved while the bit-error rate performance is not degraded. The simulation results show that the proposed method reduces the complexity significantly when compared with the previous method: for the 6×6 64QAM GSM-MIMO system with two active antennas, the average reduction rate of the complexity is as high as 45.8% in the count of the numerical operations.