A social validation explanation for mutual enhancement

Wittenbaum, Gwen M.; Bowman, Jonathan M.

doi:10.1016/s0022-1031(03)00091-x

Cited by 63 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Past research has examined the impact of a variety of discussion structures on the pooling of information in teams (Wittenbaum & Bowman, 2004). Structured discussion procedures (Stasser, Taylor, & Hanna, 1989), judge-advisor systems (Savadori, Van Swol, & Sniezek, 2001), and dialectical inquiry methods (Devine, 1999) have been investigated as means of improving the amount of information used in decision-making, the logic being that more focused, structured discussions organize the group's retrieval and combination of information, which likely enhances the impact of IS on performance.…”

Section: Moderating Role Of Discussion Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Information sharing and team performance: A meta-analysis.

Mesmer‐Magnus

DeChurch

2009

Journal of Applied Psychology

983

510

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Information sharing is a central process through which team members collectively utilize their available informational resources. The authors used meta-analysis to synthesize extant research on team information sharing. Meta-analytic results from 72 independent studies (total groups ϭ 4,795; total N ϭ 17,279) demonstrate the importance of information sharing to team performance, cohesion, decision satisfaction, and knowledge integration. Although moderators were identified, information sharing positively predicted team performance across all levels of moderators. The information sharing-team performance relationship was moderated by the representation of information sharing (as uniqueness or openness), performance criteria, task type, and discussion structure by uniqueness (a 3-way interaction). Three factors affecting team information processing were found to enhance team information sharing: task demonstrability, discussion structure, and cooperation. Three factors representing decreasing degrees of member redundancy were found to detract from team information sharing: information distribution, informational interdependence, and member heterogeneity.Keywords: group, information sharing, information sampling bias, hidden profile, information processing Organizations are increasingly assigning complex decisionmaking tasks to teams rather than to lone individuals. Personnel selection decisions usually require input from a selection committee rather than a single hiring manager; homicide investigations are typically conducted by a group of detectives rather than by a single officer; the assignment of guilt or innocence to an accused criminal is the responsibility of a jury rather than a judge. A primary advantage of using small groups and teams in these situations is to expand the pool of available information, thereby enabling groups to reach higher quality solutions than could be reached by any one individual. Still, superior solutions to complex decision tasks require members to effectively integrate unique, relevant, and often diverse informational sets.Despite the intuitive importance of effective information sharing (IS) for team decision-making (e.g., Bunderson & Sutcliffe, 2002;Jehn & Shah, 1997), past research has shown teams often deviate from the optimal utilization of information when making decisions; discussion often serves to strengthen individual prediscussion preferences rather than as a venue to share new information (i.e., biased information sampling model; Stasser & Titus, 1985).These results raise a number of questions of significant importance to the research and practice of teams. We used meta-analysis to cumulate empirical findings culled from studies examining various task domains and discussion structures as well as different aspects of IS and performance criteria to address the following questions: First, to what extent does IS impact team performance? Second, what role do moderators play in this relationship (i.e., definition of IS, operationalization of performance criteria, discussion...

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Section: Moderating Role Of Discussion Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Information sharing and team performance: A meta-analysis.

Mesmer‐Magnus

DeChurch

2009

Journal of Applied Psychology

983

510

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Section: Trust Connectionist Model Of Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With respect to processes within a group, different types of social dynamics lead to a less than optimal performance. These include conformity and polarization which move a group as a whole towards more extreme opinions (Ebbesen & Bowers, 1974;Mackie & Cooper, 1984;Isenberg, 1986), groupthink that leads to unrealistic group decisions (Janis, 1972), the lack of sharing of unique information so that intellectual resources of a group are underused (Larson et al, 1996(Larson et al, , 1998Stasser, 1999;Wittenbaum & Bowman, 2003) and the suboptimal use of relevant information channels in social networks (Leavitt, 1951;Mackenzie, 1976;Shaw, 1964).These different approaches provide a new focus for the understanding of cognition that might be summarized as collective intelligence (Levy, 1997;Heylighen, 1999) or distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995), that is, the cognitive processes and structures that emerge at the social level. To understand collective information processing, we must consider the distributed organization constituted by different individuals with different forms of knowledge and experience TRUST Connectionist Model of Communication 4 and the social network that links them together and that supports their interindividual communication.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Talking nets: A multiagent connectionist approach to communication and trust between individuals.

Overwalle

Heylighen

2006

Psychological Review

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How is information transmitted in a group? A multi-agent connectionist model is proposed that combines features of standard recurrent models to simulate the process of information uptake, integration and memorization within individual agents, with novel aspects that simulate the communication of beliefs and opinions between agents. A crucial aspect in belief updating based on information from other agents is the trust in the information provided, implemented as the consistency with the receiving agents' existing beliefs. Trust leads to a selective propagation and thus filtering out of less reliable information, and implements Grice's (1975) maxims of quality and quantity in communication. By studying these communicative aspects within the framework of standard models of information processing, the unique contribution of communicative mechanisms beyond intra-personal factors was explored in simulations of key phenomena involving persuasive communication and polarization, lexical acquisition, spreading of stereotypes and rumors, and a lack of sharing unique information in group decisions. TRUST Connectionist Model of Communication 3Cognition is not limited to the mind of an individual agent, but involves interactions with other minds. A full understanding of human thinking thus requires a deeper insight of its social origin. Sociologists and developmental psychologists have long noted that most of our knowledge of reality is the result of a social construction and communication rather than of individual observation. Economists emphasize that effective knowledge management and learning is an organizational phenomenon that determines enterprise's success or failure (Senge, 1990).Collective behaviors have a long evolutionary past, as biologists and computer scientists have built models that demonstrate how collectives of simple agents, such as ant colonies, bee hives, or flocks of birds, can process complex information more effectively than single agents facing the same tasks (Bonabeau et al., 1999).Social psychologists too have studied cognition at the group level, using laboratory experiments to document various biases and shortcomings of collective intelligence. Research has revealed that we often fall prey to biases and simplistic stereotypes about other groups, and that many of these distorted representations are emergent properties of the cognitive dynamics in single or multiple minds. Some of these biased processes are illusory correlation or the creation of an unwarranted association between a group and undesirable characteristics, accentuation of differences between groups, subtyping of deviant members (for a review see Van Rooy, Van Overwalle, Vanhoomissen, Labiouse & French, 2004) and the communication of stereotypes (e.g., Lyons & Kashima, 1993). With respect to processes within a group, different types of social dynamics lead to a less than optimal performance. These include conformity and polarization which move a group as a whole towards more extreme opinions (Ebbesen & Bowers, 1974;Mackie & ...

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“…This research shows that individuals who communicate shared information are judged as task capable because their contributions can be validated by others as accurate and relevant (see also Wittenbaum & Bowman, 2004). Similarly, Kameda, Ohtsubo, and Takezawa (1997) have found that "cognitive central" group members (i.e., members that share a large amount of information with others) are particularly influential, presumably because they play a pivotal role in validating other members' knowledge.…”

Section: Empirical Support For the Social Validation Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 70%

“…A similar idea has been proposed by Wittenbaum and Bowman (2004) with regard to mutual enhancement, but has yet to be tested.…”

Section: Theoretical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 98%