Built for unity: assessing the impact of team composition on team cohesion trajectories
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Built for unity: assessing the impact of team composition on team cohesion trajectories Bryan P. Acton 1
&
Michael T. Braun 2 & Roseanne J. Foti 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Team cohesion is a critical factor for team effectiveness. Cohesion is a dynamic emergent state, demonstrating important changes as a function of the interactions among team members. Given the important role of individual differences for impacting the quality of social interactions as well as the resulting appraisals of individuals, it is not surprising that a plethora of studies find significant relationships between team composition and team cohesion. Unfortunately, knowledge of how individual difference composition influences changes in cohesion over time is still lacking. Therefore, drawing on theories on the development of interpersonal relationships, we tested predictions regarding the role of team personality and goal orientation for shaping the longitudinal trajectories of social and task cohesion. More specifically, we used a highly interdependent laboratory simulation to assess the differential impact that individual differences have on the initial status (i.e., intercept) and change (i.e., slope) in cohesion over time. Growth curve modeling results suggest support for our predictions that different individual differences uniquely predict the intercepts and slopes of task and social cohesion. Implications for the composition and intervention of teams are discussed. Keywords Team cohesion . Team composition . Team personality . Growth curve modeling
“Adopting a temporal lens provides a new and powerful way to view organizational phenomena. It makes us speak in a different language, ask different questions, and use a different framework in the methodological aspects of our research”—Ancona, Goodman, Lawrence, and Tushman (p. 660, 2001) As teams continue to grow in importance within today’s organization, so has the need to understand them (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006; Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008). At * Bryan P. Acton [email protected] Michael T. Braun [email protected] Roseanne J. Foti [email protected] 1
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA
2
University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA
the center of this remains the age-old question: Why do some teams work together effectively, while others falter? Much research has identified team cohesion as one of the primary answers to this question. Hundreds of studies have demonstrated a link between cohesion and positive team outcomes (Beal, Cohen, Burke, & McLendon, 2003; Evans & Dion, 2012; Rosh, Offermann, & Van Diest, 2012). Furthermore, cohesion is a central mechanism (Hackman, 1987) or mediator (Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005) in models of teamwork. As cohesion is one of the critical drivers of team success, scholars have shifted their focus to understanding what meaningfully predicts higher levels of team cohesion (Salas, Estrada, & Vessey, 2015). Recent work has assessed patterns of team member characteristic
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