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The Paradox of Ambiguous Information in Collaborative and Competitive Settings

deylon{at}richmond.edu

Scott T. Allison

University of Richmondsallison{at}richmond.edu.

This research explored people’s willingness to share ambiguous and nonambiguous information in collaborative and competitive organizational settings. Using a resource-based perspective, we hypothesized (a) people will be more likely to share ambiguous information with their collaborators and nonambiguous information with their competitors and (b) their willingness to share ambiguous information with their collaborators will be moderated by task familiarity so that they will share more ambiguous information as their familiarity with the task increases. The results of five experiments supported these hypotheses. Paradoxically, participants tended to judge ambiguous information as less important than nonambiguous information despite preferring to share ambiguous information with their collaborators. Finally, a correspondence emerged between the task context and participants’ preference for sharing information: For concrete tasks, participants preferred to share nonambiguous information with their collaborators but for ambiguous tasks, participants preferred to share ambiguous information with their collaborators. Theoretical and practical organizational implications are discussed.

Group & Organization Management, Vol. 27, No. 2, 172-208 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/10501102027002002


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