Status Motives and Agent-to-Agent Information Sharing: How Evolutionary Psychology Shapes Agents’ Responses to Control System Design

The quality of decision making within firms often depends on the willingness of agents to share information with other agents. In two experiments, we examine the effects of status motives, i.e., the desire to gain the respect of and deference from others, on information sharing in two different control systems: one in which agents have incentives to share and one in which agents incur costs to share. We draw on theory from evolutionary psychology to argue that status motives modify agents’ responses to the control systems, constraining information sharing when agents have incentives to do so but motivating information sharing when agents incur costs to do so. Results support our predictions. We discuss the implications of our findings for information sharing, and the implications of applying an evolutionary framework of agent motivation to understand decision making in firms.