IT-Supported Formal Control: How Perceptual (in)Congruence Affects the Convergence of Crowd-Sourced Ideas

IT-supported teams face challenges when converging on crowd-sourced ideas. One reason is that teams have difficulties in establishing shared understanding. Enacting formal control has been suggested as a way how to overcome these challenges as they help to develop shared understanding and focus interactions on the team outcome, i.e. the ideas in a converged list. However, it is unclear if formal control can facilitate perceptual congruence and what effect it has on idea quality, e.g., an idea’s elaborateness. Perceptual congruence is operationalized by examining the agreement between leaders and team members on depth of interaction to build shared understanding. The findings show that teams receiving formal control outperform self-managed teams in terms of depth of interaction and extent of idea development. Moreover, findings indicate that extent of idea development is high at the extreme ends of perceptual congruence. Perceptual incongruence was found to be detrimental for extent of idea development.