Department of Organization Studies, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Department of Organizational- and Economic Psychology, Technische Universität Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany.
PLoS One. 2018 Jul 19;13(7):e0201180. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0201180. eCollection 2018.
Information elaboration-the act of exchanging, discussing, and integrating information and perspectives through verbal communication-tends to be considered as the silver bullet that drives the performance of diverse teams. We challenge this notion by proposing that the effect of information elaboration on team performance depends on the accuracy of within-group competence attributions, i.e. the extent to which attributions of task competence among team members correspond with members' actual task competence. We argue that information elaboration may actually harm performance when within-group competence attributions are inaccurate, given that in such teams decisions are likely to be based on suggestions from members who have much influence but little competence. We conducted an experiment with 97 gender-heterogeneous teams working on gender-typical problems and coded their interactions. Our findings support our hypotheses that members who are perceived as more competent are more influential in the information elaboration process, and that information elaboration harms performance when competence attributions are not accurate. In contrast to our expectations, pro-diversity beliefs did not mitigate this negative effect of inaccurate competence attributions. We argue that this speaks to the robustness of our findings regarding the detrimental effects of information elaboration when competence attributions are inaccurate.
信息细化——通过口头交流交换、讨论和整合信息和观点的行为——往往被认为是推动不同团队绩效的银弹。我们通过提出以下观点挑战了这一观点，即信息细化对团队绩效的影响取决于组内能力归因的准确性，即团队成员之间对任务能力的归因与成员的实际任务能力相符的程度。我们认为，当组内能力归因不准确时，信息细化实际上可能会损害绩效，因为在这样的团队中，决策可能基于具有很大影响力但能力有限的成员的建议。我们进行了一项涉及 97 个性别异质团队的实验，这些团队致力于解决性别典型问题并对其互动进行了编码。我们的研究结果支持了我们的假设，即被认为更有能力的成员在信息细化过程中更具影响力，并且当能力归因不准确时，信息细化会损害绩效。与我们的预期相反，支持多样性的信念并没有减轻不准确能力归因的负面影响。我们认为，这说明了我们关于能力归因不准确时信息细化的不利影响的研究结果的稳健性。
