When those who know do share: Group goals facilitate information sharing, but social power does not undermine it

Annika Scholl, Florian Landkammer and Kai Sassenberg

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 3, 1-17

Abstract: Good team decisions require that team members share information with each other. Yet, members often tend to selfishly withhold important information. Does this tendency depend on their power within the team? Power-holders frequently act more selfishly (than the powerless)—accordingly, they might be tempted to withhold information. We predicted that given a task goal to ‘solve a task’, power-holders would selfishly share less information than the powerless. However, a group goal to ‘solve the task together’ would compensate for this selfishness, heightening particularly power-holders’ information sharing. In parallel, an individual goal to ‘solve the task alone’ may heighten selfishness and lower information sharing (even) among the powerless. We report five experiments (N = 1305), comprising all studies conducted in their original order. Analyses yielded weak to no evidence for these predictions; the findings rather supported the beneficial role of a group goal to ensure information sharing for both the powerful and the powerless.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0213795 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 13795&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0213795

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213795

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().