Negative Evaluations as Information and Affect in Interactive Groups and Teams

Part A of this chapter conceptualizes and investigates the exchange of negative evaluations in the information exchange of interactive teams. Investigators have often identified the exchange of negative evaluations as a source of performance decrement in decision-making groups. A long time observation has been that mimetic or imitative effects from the initiation of this information type increase its generation by others. This is considered to be dysfunctional for the exchange of ideational information since increases in negative evaluations commonly reduce idea initiations. An alternative account emphasizes the functional effects that negative evaluations as information can have on group and team decision making through a discrimination of ideas and other information types exchanged in the group on quality-related criteria. Recognizing the duality in this information type, this chapter provides an account of its exchange in interactive teams that recognizes negative evaluations as simultaneously having affective and informational properties. The elaboration in dual processes is used to give a closed-form model of dynamics in the exchange of evaluations. The model is then used for abstract and general statements on processing and analytical inference.