The Role of Information Elaboration for Co-Construction of Meaning during Idea Convergence: A Causal Mediation Analysis

Teams need to co-construct meaning to establish shared understanding about concepts when converging on the best ideas generated from crowdsourcing events. Facilitation interventions can aid the co-construction of meaning. The causal mechanism is believed to be the extent exchanged information is elaborated on. However, this mediating role has not been empirically confirmed in past research. Information elaboration in teams with and without facilitation intervention was tested with causal mediation analysis by drawing on data collected in a laboratory experiment. The findings suggest that facilitated teams had better information elaboration and co-construction than non-facilitated teams. Moreover, information elaboration could be identified as a strong causal mechanism through which facilitation interventions affect the co-construction of meaning. The study contributes to unravelling the black box of team processes through which this causal effect of facilitation intervention arises and helps fostering the design of improved automated feedback mechanisms.