How do facilitation interventions foster learning? The role of evaluation and coordination as causal mediators in idea convergence

Abstract Teams need to co-construct meaning to establish shared understanding of crowdsourced ideas. This is challenging because team members are often faced with an excessive amount of ideas, they have no access to the ideator to clarify ideas, have limited meeting duration, and do not necessarily share a common working history. Facilitation interventions can aid the co-construction of meaning. However, it is uncertain if facilitation interventions that were successful in traditional convergence settings can be applied to convergence with crowdsourced ideas and what mechanisms can explain the positive association between facilitation interventions and co-creation of meaning. In this study, I tested three facilitation techniques and the mediating role of evaluation and coordination in a laboratory experiment involving 199 participants. The participants were given an IT-supported convergence task with crowdsourced ideas. The findings show that facilitated teams receiving high attention guidance and discussion encouragement outperform non-facilitated teams and that evaluation and coordination are the mechanisms through which these effects come about. The findings are beneficial for the design of conversational agents in convergence settings and for team leaders who want to establish shared understanding in convergence settings with crowdsourced ideas.