Information Sharing and Team Performance: A Meta-Analysis Jessica R. Mesmer-Magnus University of North Carolina Wilmington Leslie A. DeChurch University of Central Florida Information sharing is a central process through which team members collectively utilize their available informational resources. The authors used meta-analysis to synthesize extant research on team informa- tion sharing. Meta-analytic results from 72 independent studies (total groups = 4,795; total N = 17,279) demonstrate the importance of information sharing to team performance, cohesion, decision satisfaction, and knowledge integration. Although moderators were identified, information sharing positively pre- dicted team performance across all levels of moderators. The information sharing–team performance relationship was moderated by the representation of information sharing (as uniqueness or openness), performance criteria, task type, and discussion structure by uniqueness (a 3-way interaction). Three factors affecting team information processing were found to enhance team information sharing: task demonstrability, discussion structure, and cooperation. Three factors representing decreasing degrees of member redundancy were found to detract from team information sharing: information distribution, informational interdependence, and member heterogeneity. Keywords: group, information sharing, information sampling bias, hidden profile, information processing Organizations are increasingly assigning complex decision- making tasks to teams rather than to lone individuals. Personnel selection decisions usually require input from a selection commit- tee rather than a single hiring manager; homicide investigations are typically conducted by a group of detectives rather than by a single officer; the assignment of guilt or innocence to an accused criminal is the responsibility of a jury rather than a judge. A primary advantage of using small groups and teams in these situations is to expand the pool of available information, thereby enabling groups to reach higher quality solutions than could be reached by any one individual. Still, superior solutions to complex decision tasks re- quire members to effectively integrate unique, relevant, and often diverse informational sets. Despite the intuitive importance of effective information sharing (IS) for team decision-making (e.g., Bunderson & Sutcliffe, 2002; Jehn & Shah, 1997), past research has shown teams often deviate from the optimal utilization of information when making deci- sions; discussion often serves to strengthen individual prediscus- sion preferences rather than as a venue to share new information (i.e., biased information sampling model; Stasser & Titus, 1985). These results raise a number of questions of significant importance to the research and practice of teams. We used meta-analysis to cumulate empirical findings culled from studies examining various task domains and discussion structures as well as different aspects of IS and performance criteria to address the following questions: First, to what extent does IS impact team performance? Second, what role do moderators play in this relationship (i.e., definition of IS, operationalization of performance criteria, discussion structure, and team task type)? Third, which factors promote (e.g., cooper- ation) and suppress (e.g., information distribution) IS? Figure 1 summarizes the relationships examined in the current study. Information Sharing Uniqueness and Openness Differing theoretical and operational definitions of IS in teams may partially explain discrepant findings reported in the extant literature regarding the role of IS in performance. Most prior work on IS originates with Stasser and Titus’s (1985, 1987) biased information sampling model, which demonstrates that groups spend more time discussing shared information (information al- ready known by all group members) than unshared information (information uniquely held by one group member; Stasser & Titus, 1985, 1987). Empirical studies examining biased information sam- pling have essentially examined what Hinsz, Tindale, and Vollrath (1997) described as the commonality– uniqueness dimension of IS, or “variability in how many group members have access to a piece of information” (p. 54). We refer to these studies as investigations of the uniqueness of IS. A second subset of studies relevant to team information processing has examined aspects of information ex- change more broadly, encompassing team communication related to goals, progress, coordination, and the like, independent of the initial distribution pattern of information among team members (Henry, 1995; Jehn & Shah, 1997). We refer to these studies as investigations of the openness of IS. Table 1 presents examples of Jessica R. Mesmer-Magnus, Department of Management, Cameron School of Business, University of North Carolina Wilmington; Leslie A. DeChurch, Department of Psychology, University of Central Florida. A prior version of this article was presented at the 2008 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference in San Francisco, CA. We thank Verlin Hinsz, Dennis Devine, Ronald Piccolo, Chris Sager, and Chockalingam Viswesvaran for their constructive feedback and helpful suggestions. We thank Diana Keith and Andrea Saravia for their assistance in gathering articles. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jessica R. Mesmer-Magnus, Department of Management, Cameron School of Business, University of North Carolina Wilmington, 601 South College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403. E-mail: magnusj@uncw.edu Journal of Applied Psychology © 2009 American Psychological Association 2009, Vol. 94, No. 2, 535–546 0021-9010/09/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0013773 535