The Expert Paradox : How Team Members’ Expertise Inhibits Leaders’ Willingness to Integrate That Expertise

Today’s organizations have come to view and to use workplace teams as information processors, making the ability to manage knowledge and expertise an essential pre-requisite for effective group decisions. Consequently, an important mandate for leaders of information processing groups is to determine an approach that most benefits the group. This paper addresses this critical area by focusing on the structural and social factors affecting leaders’ behavior when guiding group decisions. Specifically, the research considers the effects of power distribution (i.e., location of expertise) on leaders’ choice to contribute their own unique knowledge or to integrate others’ information. The paper proposes that leaders do not always serve as information integrators, but may instead compete with their team members by focusing on their own position rather than promoting consideration of others’ knowledge. In addition, leaders’ perceptions of threat may mediate this result. Data from two experimental studies support these hypotheses