Information reliability and team reflection as contingencies of the relationship between information elaboration and team decision quality

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2298
• Author: Holger Patzelt,Dean A. Shepherd,Nicola Breugst,Rebecca Preller
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Published date: 01 December 2018

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Information reliability and team reflection as contingencies of

the relationship between information elaboration and team

decision quality

Nicola Breugst

1

|Rebecca Preller

1

|Holger Patzelt

1

|Dean A. Shepherd

2

1

TUM School of Management, Technical

University of Munich, Munich, Germany

2

Mendoza College of Business, University of

Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

Correspondence

Nicola Breugst, TUM School of Management,

Technical University of Munich, Arcisstr. 21,

80333 Munich, Germany.

Email: nicola.breugst@tum.de

Summary

Although previous research has found a positive relationship between information

elaboration and team decision quality if team members possess diverse information,

we know little about the boundary conditions of this relationship. In this study, we

provide a more nuanced understanding of these boundary conditions by focusing

on team‐external and team‐internal contingencies. Based on a sample of 52 student

teams working on a decision‐making task, we find a complex three‐way interaction

between information elaboration, information reliability, and team reflection in

explaining team decision quality. The relationship between information elaboration

and team decision quality was not significant when teams were confronted with

unreliable information independent of their level of reflection. However, for teams

confronted with reliable information, the relationship between information elabora-

tion and team decision quality was positive for low levels of reflection but negative

for high levels of reflection. Our results provide important implications for our under-

standing of information elaboration, team reflection, and the context of team decision

making.

KEYWORDS

information elaboration, information reliability, team decision quality, team reflection

1|INTRODUCTION

Successful team decision making requires that teams make use of

diverse information distributed among their members (Homan, van

Knippenberg, van Kleef, & De Dreu, 2007; van Knippenberg, De

Dreu, & Homan, 2004). Capitalizing on diverse information, however,

is not easy, and many teams fail to do so, which often leads to poor

decision outcomes (Mell, van Knippenberg, & van Ginkel, 2014;

Schulz‐Hardt, Brodbeck, Mojzisch, Kerschreiter, & Frey, 2006;

Stasser & Titus, 1985). In particular, in “tasks with a strong informa-

tion‐processing or decision‐making component”(Guillaume, Dawson,

Otaye‐Ebede, Woods, & West, 2017, p. 279), information elabora-

tion—exchanging, discussing, and integrating information in the team

(van Knippenberg et al., 2004)—is a key contributor to decision

quality (Nederveen Pieterse, van Knippenberg, & van Ginkel, 2011;

Rico, Sánchez‐Manzanares, Antino, & Lau, 2012; van Knippenberg,

Kooij‐de Bode, & van Ginkel, 2010). As a consequence, a growing

body of research has identified antecedents of information elabora-

tion, such as requests for team members to share domain‐specific

information (Mell et al., 2014), collective leadership and similarity in

team members' mental models (Resick, Murase, Randall, & DeChurch,

2014), and team members' task representations (van Ginkel & van

Knippenberg, 2009, 2012).

However, although we know that information elaboration is

crucial for teams to integrate members' diverse information to make

good decisions, research has just started to explore the conditions

under which information elaboration is more or less conducive to team

decision quality. This is an important research topic because informa-

tion elaboration requires the team's time and effort (Hoever, van

Knippenberg, van Ginkel, & Barkema, 2012; Resick et al., 2014), so a

Received: 10 January 2016 Revised: 24 April 2018 Accepted: 3 May 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2298

1314 Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2018;39:1314–1329.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

better understanding of the relationship between information elabora-

tion and decision quality can inform teams when these investments

are most likely to pay off. For example, Gardner, Staats, and Gino

(2012) suggested that teams particularly benefit from processing

information in uncertain tasks, and Resick et al. (2014) found that

information elaboration is more beneficial for team performance in

turbulent than in stable environments.

Although these studies suggest that the task environment is an

important contingency of the relationship between information elabo-

ration and decision quality, a recent review noted that “the effect of

information properties on team decision making has received little

research attention”(Sohrab, Waller, & Kaplan, 2015, p. 500). Specifi-

cally, many teams need to make decisions in situations in which the

available information is unreliable—that is, the trustworthiness of the

information is uncertain (Chancey & Bliss, 2012; Low & Mohr, 2001).

For example, information reliabilityis often low in highly novel contexts

where the information's trustworthiness can simply not be assessed

(Lee, Chen, & Hartmann,2016) and in dynamic contextswhere available

informationis quickly outdated (Stieglitz,Knudsen, & Becker, 2016).

Moreover, because teams switch during team decision making

between action processes (i.e., activities teams engage in to directly

work toward their goals, such as information elaboration; Marks,

Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001) and transition processes (i.e., time periods

of evaluation and planning that guide the accomplishment of team

goals; Marks et al., 2001), analyzing the interplay between these pro-

cesses has the potential to contribute to a more holistic understanding

of what teams do to integrate the diverse information available to

their members. We follow the suggestion by Schippers, Edmondson,

and West (2014) that team reflection—a transition process described

as thinking about and adapting team objectives and processes (West,

Garrod, & Carletta, 1997)—supports teams' information processing

under challenging conditions, such as unpredictable environments

(Chen, Bamberger, Song, & Vashdi, 2018). Thus, we expect an inter-

play between information elaboration, information reliability, and team

reflection in explaining team decision quality. Specifically, our study

addresses the following research question: To what extent do infor-

mation reliability and team reflection impact the relationship between

information elaboration and team decision quality?

To explore this question empirically, we rely on a sample of 52

three‐person teams confronted with a hidden profile task (Hoever

et al., 2012; Schulz‐Hardt et al., 2006; van Ginkel & van Knippenberg,

2008) for which we experimentally manipulate information reliability.

Our findings show that team reflection is an important contingency

influencing the extent to which teams incorporate reliable or unreliable

information that is elaborated within the team in their decision making.

Our study makes the following primary contributions. First,

although previous research has often assumed that information elabo-

ration is beneficial when diverse information is distributed across team

members (Mell et al., 2014; Nederveen Pieterse et al., 2011; van

Knippenberg et al., 2004), we theorize and find that the benefits of

information elaboration depend on a combination of environmental

conditions and concomitant team processes. Thus, we contribute to

previous work on information elaboration by including important

team‐internal and team‐external contingencies illustrating that under

some conditions, information elaboration can be beneficial, irrelevant,

or even detrimental to team decision quality. Second, although we

know surprisingly little about how the properties of the information

to be elaborated impact the outcomes of team decision tasks (Sohrab

et al., 2015), previous research has (often implicitly) assumed that teams

can be certain about the available information's quality. The few excep-

tions to this assumption (Littlepage, Perdue, & Fuller, 2012; Steinel, Utz,

& Koning, 2010) have manipulated the quality of individual information

items to understand how teams deal with items differing in importance

for their team decision. By exploring how properties of entire informa-

tion sets (in terms of either high or low levels of reliability, i.e., differ-

ences in the teams' certainty about the information's trustworthiness)

impact team decision quality, our study extends previous insights into

the external team environment's influence on team performance

(Resick et al., 2014). Finally, we contribute to work on team reflection

in team decision making (De Dreu, 2007; Gurtner, Tschan, Semmer, &

Nägele, 2007; van Ginkel & van Knippenberg, 2009) by illustrating that

although team reflection can compensate for a lack of the elaboration

of reliable information, under conditions of high team reflection,

intense information elaboration can decrease team decision quality.

Thus, this studyprovides novel insights intothe interplay of team action

and transition processes in different team decision‐making contexts.

2|THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND

HYPOTHESES

Drawing on extant research (Homan et al., 2007; Mell et al., 2014; van

Knippenberg et al., 2010), we assume that information elaboration is

related to team decision quality when team members possess diverse

information, and we focus on the contingencies of this relationship.

First, we theorize about how a lack of information reliability increases

the importance of information elaboration. Second, we explain how

team reflection shapes the team's potential to benefit from the elabo-

ration of reliable or unreliable information.

2.1 |Information elaboration and decision quality

To understand why some teams are able to benefit from diversity and

thus from diverse information distributed across team members, van

Knippenberg et al. (2004) developed the categorization–elaboration

model. The model suggests that diversity can stimulate information

elaboration in teams—that is, “the exchange of information and per-

spectives, individual‐level processing of the information and perspec-

tives, the process of feeding back the results of this individual‐level

processing into the group, and discussion and integration of its

implications”(van Knippenberg et al., 2004, p. 1011). Thus, information

elaboration is a process in which team members explain their own

ideas, thoughts, and opinions; come to know those of other team

members; discuss differences and commonalities in the information

available to them; and, in doing so, integrate their idiosyncratic

knowledge (Hoever et al., 2012; Rico et al., 2012). If the task requires

the team to pool and process diverse information available to its

members, information elaboration is needed to increase team perfor-

mance (Guillaume et al., 2017; van Knippenberg et al., 2004). Indeed,

information elaboration was found to support teams in making better

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