Deconstructing Information Elaboration: The Critical Role of Framing and Initial Dialogue

Information elaboration is crucial for successfully responding to change, and teams inevitably frame changes to ground them. Yet, there is sparse knowledge around how framing affects information elaboration. In investigating the relationship that framing has with information elaboration, we show that framing starts a domino effect throughout the phases of information elaboration. Our experiment shows that opportunity framing motivates teams to engage with the change by asking questions about it, which increases the sharing and integrating of unique information, thereby improving decision performance. In contrast, threat framing is followed by avoiding the change through making status quo-directed statements and then discussing shared information, ultimately lowering decision performance. Our findings contribute to the information elaboration literature by helping explain differences in information elaboration’s effectiveness through uncovering interdependent behaviors. Next, we move information elaboration’s antecedents beyond static characteristics to include dynamic tactics