Testing a New Model of Team Interdependence

Companies rely on teams to combine their different skills and solve multidisciplinary problems (Engestrom, 2008; Schrage, 1995). One crucial characteristic of teams is their interdependent nature (Sundstrom, de Meuse, & Futrell, 1990). However, interdependence as a construct is not well understood and its role in dynamic team processes is not clear. Recent theoretical advances have proposed a new model of interdependence – one that places two forms of interdependence at the beginning of a path that leads through task and social constructs to team effectiveness (Courtright, Thurgood, Stewart, & Pierotti, 2015). This new model was tested in two data sets of engineering student project teams. Evidence supported only one of four proposed pathways in one data set, and none of the pathways in the second data set. These findings suggest that either this model does not represent team dynamics well, or the samples on which the model was initially meta-analytically tested do not generalize to the present samples. Future research should continue to test this model in other samples, using other measures of interdependence, mediators, and outcome variables

Finding Teams that Fight Fair: Exploring Trajectories of Team Conflict Over Time

Disagreements are a reality for teams. Yet how and when teams experience conflict may impact their chances of success. We know relatively little about how team conflict emerges over time, especially for project-based teams. Disagreements over personal topics, logistics, and contributions have been consistently damaging to team performance (De Dreu & Weingart, 2003; O’Neill, Allen, & Hastings, 2013). The implications of task-based conflict over time, however, are inconsistent and poorly understood. To resolve these questions, I conducted three studies examining how conflict developed over the lifetimes of 272 engineering design project teams. Study 1 explored the measurement and patterns of dynamic team conflict. Conflict can be consistently measured over time; I found two classes of teams following different conflict trajectories. In Study 2, I examined whether personality and demographic traits influence team conflict over time and explored how conflict affects performance. Members’ demographic characteristics and personality traits related to their individual conflict perceptions. Accelerating relationship conflict predicted poorer team-rated performance, whereas extraversion and conscientiousness predicted better team-rated performance. In Study 3, I used faultlines to predict conflict paths and team performance. Teams with demographic faultlines saw relationship conflict increase more quickly over time. This in turn predicted lower performance. Personality faultlines had no relation to conflict or performance. Taken together, this set of studies uses new team input methods and finds that clusters of teams explain the conflict-success connection. These results help us understand conflict as it happens: from the moment teams work together to when they complete their projects

P05. Team Interdependence: Construct and Measurement Challenges

Background: Teams are “interdependent collections of individuals who share responsibility for specific outcomes” (Sundstrom et al., 1990; p. 120), and they are used in work organizations to achieve difficult and complex goals. Indeed, the degree to which teams are interdependent serves an important role in team research. However, researchers use varying measures of interdependence (see Pearce, 1993; Staples & Webster, 2008; van der Vegt et al., 2001) that have received little systematic construct validation. Given the criticality of the interdependence construct in teams, the fact that there is conceptual and methodological confusion in this area is troublesome. Methods: In this study, we examined the reliability of various team interdependence measures and the intercorrelations among them. The members of 147 student project teams (N = 547) responded to six measures of team interdependence. Results: Preliminary results suggest that, although they are often used interchangeably by researchers, these interdependence measures are only minimally interrelated, suggesting that this construct and its measurement needs more serious attention. Discussion: Given that team interdependence measures were not strongly interrelated, this suggests these measures are not measuring the same underlying construct. Conclusion: More research is needed to compare these task-related measures to other types of interdependence, such as goal and reward interdependence. Furthermore, future studies should examine the predictive power of interdependence measures on team process variables. Interdisciplinary Reflection: Team research bridges the fields of psychology, business, and sociology. By understanding teams in the workplace, we can understand social processes, how individuals behave in groups, and how to properly design work tasks for optimal performance

Looking sharp: Becoming a search template boosts precision and stability in visual working memory

Visual working memory (VWM) plays a central role in visual cognition, and current work suggests that there is a special state in VWM for items that are the goal of visual searches. However, whether the quality of memory for target templates differs from memory for other items in VWM is currently unknown. In this study, we measured the precision and stability of memory for search templates and accessory items to determine whether search templates receive representational priority in VWM. Memory for search templates exhibited increased precision and probability of recall, whereas accessory items were remembered less often. Additionally, while memory for Templates showed benefits when instances of the Template appeared in search, this benefit was not consistently observed for Accessory items when they appeared in search. Our results show that becoming a search template can substantially affect the quality of a representation in VWM