The Hazards of Interaction: Why Isolation Can Benefit Performance

Interaction is central to organizational theory and strategic management, but scholars have differing views on the impact of interaction on performance. For some, interaction is essential for distilling good practices and spreading them. When people interact, good practices prevail and bad practices fade away, they assume. This assumption underlies practices in knowledge transfer, innovation, and education, such as best practices sessions and learning from peers. But social psychologists and institutional sociologists, among others, have shown that interaction can also disseminate useless or even harmful practices, thereby harming performance. To address the differing views, here we model how interaction affects people’s skills and ultimately – their performance. In the model, one’s performance depends on behavioral skills, and interactions spread skills and practices, whether valid or fallacious. We utilize recent findings in psychology to incorporate assumptions on how people assess their skills and how...