Abstract
Organizations depend on employees to proactively seek and use decision-relevant information, yet individuals frequently engage in information avoidance, deliberately staying uninformed even when additional information would improve decision quality. Such avoidance behavior can impair team effectiveness and organizational performance, particularly when employees overlook information with meaningful consequences for others. Although prior research has identified drivers of this phenomenon, evidence on effective interventions to reduce avoidance remains limited.
We theorize that making the impact of avoidance transparent reduces individuals’ propensity to remain uninformed by increasing the salience and perceived relevance of information acquisition, thereby limiting self-serving justifications for ignorance.
To examine this proposition, we conduct an online experiment testing whether impact transparency decreases information avoidance in organizational decision-making contexts.