Effects of Competition on Strategic Information Sharing and Use in Group Decision-Making

Pressure to compete with others is commonplace in organizational, educational, and political settings where groups are often required to make decisions. In those situations group members face a mixture of cooperative motives to reach high-quality group decisions and competitive motives to do well personally. In five studies, using a hidden profile task, we induced competitive motives by means of negative goal interdependence (Studies 1, 2, & 5), individual evaluation (Study 3) and priming (Study 4). Our studies revealed that competition, compared to cooperation, led group members to withhold unique, but not common information. Group members were also more reluctant to disconfirm their initial preferences in competition, than in cooperation, which significantly lowered decision quality. The last study showed that competition counteracts the positive effects of expertise on information sharing: Assigned experts shared and repeated less unique information than non-experts when they were in competition, while the reverse was found in cooperation. These results support a motivated information processing approach of group decision-making.