Introduction
Editors:
Leigh L. Thompson
John M. Levine
David M. Messick
The idea for a conference on shared cognition in organizations came about several years
ago, when we decided to bring together a group of eminent scholars interested in how
people in organizations create, distribute, and act upon knowledge. Our goal was to
explore new directions in social cognition research that shed light on how organizational
members think and reason.
In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to the social bases of cognition
(for example, see Higgins, 1992; Hinsz, Tindale, & Vollrath, 1997; Levine, Resnick,
& Higgins, 1993; Nye & Brower, 1996; Resnick, Levine, & Teasley, 1991;
Thompson, 1998). Using such rubrics as socially-shared cognition, distributed cognition,
and contextualized cognition, investigators are focusing on cognition as an interpersonal
as well as an intrapersonal process. Without negating the importance of information
processing at the individual level, social psychologists (as well as developmental and
organizational psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and educational researchers)
are exploring the implications of viewing cognition as a fundamentally social activity.
This new way of thinking about social cognition was a major impetus for organizing our
conference and preparing this volume of conference papers.
At about the same time the area of socially-shared cognition was beginning to develop,
an interesting intellectual migration was occurring, with social psychologists, both newly
minted and well-established, moving from psychology departments in colleges of arts and
sciences to organization behavior departments in business schools. This migration has
resulted in two important developments. First, social psychologists who enter business
schools find themselves barraged with interesting questions about how knowledge is used by
teams and collectives. These questions do not come only from MBA students demanding that
professors present a clear take-home point. In addition, they are frequently asked by
business school colleagues trained in different areas, such as sociology and economics.
These questions have forced social psychologists to think more deeply about issues of
persuasion, motivation, and group interaction in organizational contexts, and this
thinking has often led to new research questions concerning how socially-shared knowledge
is developed and used. Second, social psychologists who enter business schools often
change their research methodologies. Controlled laboratory experiments with college
sophomores often lose their appeal, whereas observations of work teams on shop floors,
archival analyses of CEO decisions, and questionnaires distributed in MBA classrooms
become more attractive. These new methodologies often produce information about
socially-shared knowledge that is difficult if not impossible to obtain using traditional
social psychological methods.
A third factor that inspired the conference and resulting volume is our belief that
social psychologists interested in social cognition have much to learn from organizational
theorists. Those of us who observe events in organizations are gratified to learn that our
theories about such phenomena as proximity and liking, mere exposure, and thought-induced
affect are applicable there. However, in many instances, what we consider to be uniquely
social psychological phenomena have been analyzed in other terms. For example, talk to
educated executives about social cognition, schemas, and heuristics, and they will tell
you about March and Simon's theory of the firm. Mention biases, and they'll cite
escalation of commitment and Shubik's dollar auction. Talk about polarization and the
formation of group-level norms, and they'll bring up clique networks and information
brokers. We believe that social psychologists have much to offer to the field of
organizational behavior, but our contributions depend on our openness to the theoretical
contributions of organizational scholars.
We can think of no organizational phenomenon more relevant to social cognition than
"knowledge." In fact, as we prepared this volume, we were introduced to a new
title in many organizational charts: CKO, or chief knowledge officer. In this volume, we
brought together a distinguished group of social psychologists who have made important
contributions to social cognition and group processes. We cast a wide net in terms of the
topics covered, and we challenged authors to think about how their research applies to the
management (or mismanagement) of knowledge in organizations. We divided the volume into
three sections: the first focusing on knowledge systems; the second focusing on
emotional-motivational systems; and the third focusing on communication and behavioral
systems. A final conclusion chapter discusses and integrates the various contributions.
The first section deals with how knowledge and information are created, stored, and
acted upon within organizations. Moreland focuses on transactive memory systems in groups,
which are shared mental representations for encoding and acting upon knowledge. In a
programmatic series of experiments, he finds that gropu members who train together perform
better, even holding constant the training that each member has. Thus, team training
allows group members to develop implicit, shared understandings of the task and each
person's knowledge base. Higgins examines how the mere act of transferring knowledge can
affect actors' beliefs about the knowledge. Specifically, people naturally
"tune" their message to suit the perceived needs and interests of their
audience. The very act of "tuning" introduces a bias in the communicator's
subsequent use of the message as a source of knowledge and evaluations, yet the
communicator does not realize this. Stasser et al. examine how the distribution of
knowledge among group members affects the likelihood of its use, independent of its actual
value. Small groups tend to mention disproportionate amounts of shared, relative to
unshared, information at the expense of pooling unshared information. This tendency to
discuss common information is not easily remedied. Finally, Messick examines organizations
in which knowledge places the originator in a position of risk. "Dirty secrets"
are secrets about real or potential wrongdoing that are concealed from competitors,
governmental and regulatory agencies, the press, and the public. Messick focuses on the
tobacco industry as a case in point and argues that concealing knowledge is a strategic
decision.
The second section focuses on emotional and motivational aspects of knowledge within
organizations. Kruglanski et al. examine how social actors' motivations affect how they
use knowledge. In a series of experiments, Kruglanski et al. demonstrate that individual
needs for cognitive closure are more satisfied by the emergence and maintenance of shared
knowledge that is politically conservative, socially intolerant, anti-democratic, and
system-justifying than by knowledge that poses a challenge to the status quo. Tetlock
examines how accountability affects the utilization of knowledge. In this approach, people
are viewed as intuitive politicians, whose key goal is to protect their identity in the
eyes of key constituencies. A theory of accountability is proposed in which several
predictions are made about social actors' behavior. Thompson et al. focus on how
organizational actors use emotions to gain resources when negotiating. In contrast to the
traditional view of emotion as a detriment to effective negotiation, Thompson et al.
suggest that negotiators can capitalize on emotion at the bargaining table. Strategies
involve both perceiving emotion in others and experiencing emotion for oneself. Finally,
Kramer examines how paranoia can develop in organizational knowledge communities. Kramer
demonstrates how trust-related judgments may be conceptualized as a dilemma game, in which
social actors are uncertain about others' motives, intentions, and behavior.
The last section focuses on communication and behavioral aspects of knowledge. Cialdini
et al. discuss the formation of norms within organizations as a consequence of behaviors
and context. The triple tumor of dishonesty model is used to argue that organizations that
establish dishonest business practices as a socially acceptable behavioral norm lose far
more than they gain. Cialdini et al. suggest how organizations may benefit by taking
advantage of descriptive and injunctive norms. Burt et al. examine how social networks
influence the dissemination and treatment of knowledge. Burt highlights the tension
between the network theory of structural holes defining entrepreneurial opportunity versus
the network theory of cohesion defining security and trust. Burt presents an alternative
to cohesion: A network theory of trust emerging from third-party gossip. Levine and
Moreland focus on knowledge transmission and newcomer socialization in work groups. They
argue that a critical task for newcomers entering workgroups is learning the shared mental
models that oldtimers possess. Levine and Moreland point out that shared mental models can
inhibit as well as enhance group performance. Gruenfeld et al. examine how groups
communicate norms and highlight the discontinuity between what newcomers see and what
oldtimers say. Gruenfeld et al. present the results of an empirical study in which
newcomers to intact groups display greater integrative complexity after than before their
group membership, suggesting that newcomers experience cognitive growth in response to
their new environment. Finally, Olivera and Argote examine how organizations learn and
develop new products as a result of knowledge acquisition and transfer. They present a
CORE framework (Construction, Operation, Reconstruction, and External relations) that
identifies tradeoffs in the product development process.
In a concluding chapter, Boles summarizes and integrates the various contributions and
suggests some interesting directions for future research.
References
Higgins, E. T. (1992). Achieving "shared reality" in the communication game:
A social action that creates meaning. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 11,
107-131.
Hinsz, V. B., Tindale, R. S., & Vollrath, D. A. (1997). The emerging
conceptualization of groups as information processors. Psychological Bulletin, 121,
43-64.
Levine, J. M., Resnick, L. B, and Higgins, E. T. (1993). Social foundations of
cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 44, 585-612.
Nye, J. L., & Brower, A. M. (1996). What's social about social cognition?
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Resnick, L., Levine, J., & Teasley, S. (Eds.). (1991). Perspectives on socially
shared cognition. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Thompson, L. (1998). The mind and heart of the negotiator. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
