Information sharing and team performance: A meta-analysis.

Abstract

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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