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This longitudinal study used data from 91 self-managed teams (456 individuals, 60 nationalities)
to examine the interactive effects of a team’s task (“workflow”) network structure and its cultural
diversity (as indexed by nationality) on the team’s “potency” (i.e., the team’s confidence in its
ability to perform) and its performance (as rated by ex...
Citations
... The questions above arise in all of the different settings where team formation and performance are important. Indeed, in online collaboration over the Web [34], creative undertakings [20], technology and science [39] and school [37], group size and the structure of social ties in the group have been reported to be of importance for the performance of teams. Although this diversity of settings already make the questions rich, they become even richer when one considers the plethora of external circumstances that can influence team formation in each of the settings. ...
... A question that has attracted considerable attention in the literature, is whether team structure influences team performance [34,20,39,37,44]. Previous studies have examined correlations between performance of teams and team size or dyadic team network structure. ...
Humans collaborate in different contexts such as in creative or scientific projects, in workplaces and in sports. Depending on the project and external circumstances, a newly formed collaboration may include people that have collaborated before in the past, and people with no collaboration history. Such existing relationships between team members have been reported to influence the performance of teams. However, it is not clear how existing relationships between team members should be quantified, and whether some relationships are more likely to occur in new collaborations than others. Here we introduce a new family of structural patterns, m-patterns, which formalize relationships between collaborators and we study the prevalence of such structures in data and a simple random-hypergraph null model. We analyze the frequency with which different collaboration structures appear in our null model and show how such frequencies depend on size and hyperedge density in the hypergraphs. Comparing the null model to data of human and non-human collaborations, we find that some collaboration structures are vastly under- and overrepresented in empirical datasets. Finally, we find that structures of scientific collaborations on COVID-19 papers in some cases are statistically significantly different from those of non-COVID-19 papers. Examining citation counts for 4 different scientific fields, we also find indications that repeat collaborations are more successful for 2-author scientific publications and less successful for 3-author scientific publications as compared to other collaboration structures.
... In team management, potency refers to team members' shared beliefs in their ability to perform and complete work (Kirkman et al. 2004;Maynard et al. 2012). Teams with high levels of potency may be better able to channel the work performance of their members to tackle challenges and to persist until they finish their work and missions (Edmondson 2002;Kirkman et al. 2004;Tröster et al. 2014). In the SPT context, potency gives team members ample confidence to actively express their opinions and ideas as well as persistently seek out more challenging solutions that may not only accommodate project dynamics and meet customer needs but also aggressively exceed expectations. ...
... In the SPT context, potency gives team members ample confidence to actively express their opinions and ideas as well as persistently seek out more challenging solutions that may not only accommodate project dynamics and meet customer needs but also aggressively exceed expectations. In other words, potency enables the team to build shared beliefs that stimulate team members to aim higher and strengthen awareness among members (Tröster et al. 2014), which helps the team reach a consensus concerning a higher level of tailoring performance. This enables the team to be more effective in setting better goals that in turn produce holistic and quality tailoring decisions. ...
Contemporary business and software environments are highly competitive and rapidly evolving, resulting in software projects that are highly customized and changeable during development. Therefore, software process tailoring (SPT) is important as software teams conduct SPT to adjust shared development processes and evolve the project to better meet unique and dynamic needs. SPT is a special type of teamwork in which members’ active participation and critical input are necessary for understanding and synthesizing various business and technical concerns that may be divergent and conflictual and then jointly identifying an integrated tailoring solution. In this context, this study examines members’ decisive and critical involvement in SPT and adopts a motivational perspective to explore how motivation can facilitate SPT performance. Specifically, we use empowerment theory to develop a model to theorize and examine how psychological empowerment (PE) in terms of meaningfulness, autonomy, potency, and impact motivates software teams to efficiently and effectively conduct SPT. The model also considers the power distance (PD) to understand how it functions in team-based critical thinking and decisional processes to energize team members’ participative effort. The investigation surveyed 102 software development teams and used partial least squares (PLS) to analyze the data. The results show that PE in terms of the four components has various influences on SPT performance and that PD has nonsignificant moderating effects. This study contributes to the software engineering literature by uncovering the contextual mechanism underlying the relationship between PE and PD in SPT. The limitations and possible extensions of this study are also outlined for future research.
... The recognition of a single member of a team will, via social influence processes, produce positive spillover effects on the performance of the other team members, as well as on overall team performance, and this is particularly the case when the distinguished individual has a central position in the team (see [51]). More broadly, teams with more centralized structures are generally more successful: centrality is beneficial for individual and team performance (see [52][53][54]). ...
While the output of a team is evident, the productivity of each team member is typically not readily identifiable. In this paper we consider the problem of measuring the productivity of team members. We propose a new concept of coworker productivity, which we refer to as eigenvalue productivity (EVP). We demonstrate the existence and uniqueness of our concept and show that it possesses several desirable properties. Also, we suggest a procedure for specifying the required productivity matrix of a team, and illustrate the operational practicability of EVP by means of three examples representing different types of available data.
... Regardless of the label used, the distinction is common in research, as it provides a measurable and theoretically relevant way of understanding status differences between people (Au et al, 2017;Castilla, 2008;Tröster et al., 2014). ...
National status has been found to influence how people are perceived in multinational teams. Team members from an international background are often perceived as less competent than those from the local context. Studies mainly focus on language differences to explain this phenomenon, but in this study, we offer a different theoretical explanation. We propose that national status can affect psychological safety and its development within teams, which in turn affects verbal behavior and competence ratings. To test this notion, we examine differences in psychological safety growth, verbal behavior and competence ratings among home country nationals based in the United Kingdom (UK) and international members of newly formed multinational teams. In a sample of 519 team members (101 teams), results showed that internationals, compared to home country nationals, have lower initial psychological safety, as well as slower development in psychological safety over time. Furthermore, the relationship between national status and competence ratings was partially mediated by psychological safety growth and verbal behavior. These results were fully replicated on a separate sample of 538 team members (90 teams) in a second study using an identical research design. However, exploratory analyses indicated that the pattern of findings were not consistent across team members from Africa, Asia, and Europe. The psychological safety of home nationals only started and grew more quickly than that of Asians, while only African and Asian team members spoke less and were rated as less competent. Together these results have implications for managers of newly formed multinational teams.
... Drawing on a single case study, our case results might be affected by the specific application and cultural context. This is a common issue for many studies involving human resources and their behaviours, and clearly limits the results from being generalised [67]. Moreover, even though the number of network tools and indicators considered was high, the study is clearly not conclusive. ...
Healthcare teams act in a very complex environment and present extremely peculiar features since they are multidisciplinary, work under quickly changing conditions, and often stay together for a short period with a dynamically fluctuating team membership. Thus, in the broad discussions about the future of healthcare, the strategy for improving providers' collaboration and team dynamics is becoming a central topic. Within this context, this paper aims to discuss different viewpoints about the application of network science to teamworking. Our results highlight the potential benefits deriving from network science-enabled analysis, and also show some preliminary empirical evidence through a real case study. In so doing, we intend to stimulate discussions regarding the implications of network science in the investigation and improvement of healthcare teams. The intention is to pave the way for future research in this context by suggesting the potential advantages of healthcare teamwork analysis, as well as recognising its challenges and threats.
... Prior research indicates that the more culturally diverse a team is, the more likely the team members to disagree over how to organize their workflow (Tröster et al., 2014;Vodosek, 2007). In other words, cultural diversity has been shown to contribute to increased process conflict (Jäger and Raich, 2011;Vodosek, 2005). ...
The role of different types of intelligence in the occurrence of conflict in global virtual teams (GVTs) has largely been overlooked in the literature. As suggested by the theory of multiple intelligences, this study explores how cultural intelligence (CQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) influence the occurrence of interpersonal, task and process conflicts in GVTs. Furthermore, by drawing on the contingency theory of task conflict and performance in groups and organisational teams, we examine the impact of these different types of conflict on the performance of GVTs. Utilising multilevel analysis, we tested the research model using a sample of 810 graduate and undergraduate business students from 38 different countries who worked in 232 GVTs. The results show that the CQ and EQ of the team members reduce the occurrence of the three different intragroup conflicts in GVTs. We also demonstrate that process conflict negatively affects GVT performance. We discuss the implications for research and practice.
... Differences in motivations, personalities and other group processes may influence students' experiences in collaborative testing and are difficult to control given the nature of individual differences. Individual level attributes include students' performance motivation (French & Kottke, 2013), personality traits, and socio-cultural background (Pineda et al., 2009;Tröster et al., 2014). Group level processes include social comparison, conformity, and conflict management (Ilarda & Findlay, 2006;Micari & Drane, 2011;Micari & Pazos, 2014;Mohammed & Angell, 2004). ...
Collaborative testing is recognised as an effective assessment approach linked to positive student outcomes including enhanced test performance and reduced assessment anxiety. While collaborative testing approaches appear beneficial to university students in general, it is unclear whether students from different year levels benefit to the same extent. Therefore, the overarching aim of this study was to compare the perceptions and performances of first and third- year undergraduate students taking part in collaborative testing on multiple occasions during a semester. It was predicted that first-year students would perceive the collaborative testing opportunities as more beneficial than third-years given their limited formative experiences with university assessment. Further, it was expected that students would generally perform at a higher level on collaborative versus individual tests in line with previous work. Student performance and perceptions of collaborative testing were collected on two occasions within a semester over a period of two years in both a first-year and third-year course. Quantitative and qualitative results revealed that first-year students were more receptive and perceived more benefits relating to collaborative testing than third-years despite the fact both cohorts generally performed at a higher standard on the collaborative versus individual components. These findings suggest that while collaborative testing is considered beneficial to most, if not all, students, the benefits appear to be greater for first-year student cohorts.
... Therefore, there were no significant differences between both forms of teams but the culturally diverse team scored higher in task measures such as problem-solving (Watson et al., 1993). Moreover, Tröster et al. (2014) researched 60 nationalities on the network structure and cultural diversity's impact on team potency and performance. The results indicate that the workflow networks simplify the team potency which emerges a centralized network that helps enhance the team performance. ...
... Actually, there are various empirical studies examining those variables whether they positively or negatively influenced by cultural diversity (Stahl et al., 2019) but our study is not able to do so since the majority of respondents stated that there are only two different nationalities in the team. Therefore, the recommendations were made to encourage further study to gather the data from more different nationalities and different countries since more culturally diverse teams leads to the stronger effect on team performance (Tröster et al., 2014). Also, since we aim to explore the study in Thailand setting, the data was gathered from only Thai people. ...
Team performance is key in each organisation. Hence, cultural effects in teams are a relevant matter of subject clarifying the ambiguous findings from previous research. With this background, we investigate how the macro-constructs of conflict, communication effectiveness, social integration, creativity and satisfaction interact with cultural diversity on team performance in an environment characterised by a largely homogeneous and ethnic workforce. We test our hypotheses on a sample of firms in Thailand. Our results indicate that creativity and satisfaction have a significant positive impact on team performance whereas cultural diversity has a significant positive impact on influencing conflict in a team-based environment. However, cultural diversity has no significant impact on communication effectiveness and social integration, and it has no significant impact on team performance.
The key theoretical contributions from our study are that cultural diversity can contribute to conflict even in a team composition that is seemingly cohesive and homogeneous in nature. Further, our study establishes that creativity and satisfaction have a positive effect on team performance even in the context of a homogeneous and ethnically majority-based team. For the practitioners, the results of the study indicate that initial actions need to be taken by the leaders of multicultural teams as they create teams to avoid the initial pitfalls due to conflict.
... When team members share the belief in the value of their team, they are willing to fight for it because they regard it as worthwhile. Team members with high team potency believe that their team is capable of overcoming future obstacles and challenges; that is, their current effort will pay off in the future (Bandura, 1977;Tröster, Mehra, & van Knippenberg, 2014). Empirical evidence also indicates that team potency is an important determinant in successfully influencing team motivation and team effectiveness (Pearce, Gallagher, & Ensley, 2002;Shelton, Waite, & Makela, 2010). ...
Based on social information processing theory, this study builds a multilevel model to explore the effects of humble leader behavior on performance in teams. Time-lagged and multi-source data were gathered from 298 employees across 70 work teams. Results supported our model such that at the individual level, humble leader behavior was positively related to individual performance via organization-based self-esteem; at the team level, humble leader behavior was positively related to team performance via team potency. Moreover, team cognitive diversity moderated the indirect effects of humble leader behavior on individual and team performances, such that the positive indirect effects were stronger for teams with high cognitive diversity than for those with low cognitive diversity. Implications and limitations are also discussed.
... Diverse teams may struggle with workflow issues and thus benefit more from leadership interventions (Kearney & Gebert, 2009;Nederveen Pieterse et al., 2019). In a similar vein, Tröster et al. (2014) found that teams with higher cultural diversity benefited more from a centralized workflow network than less diverse teams. Despite the absence of leadership focus in their study, their interpretation in terms of a greater need for centralized coordination in more diverse teams is well aligned with our proposition here. ...
The social network perspective provides a valuable lens to understand the effectiveness of team leaders. In understanding leadership impact in team networks, an important question concerns the structural influence of leader centrality in advice-giving networks on team performance. Taking the inconsistent evidence for the positive relationship of network centrality and leadership effectiveness as a starting point, we suggest that the positive impact of leader centrality in advice-giving networks is contingent on team needs for leadership to meet communication and coordination challenges, which we argue are larger in larger teams. Developing our analysis, we examine the mediating role of member collaboration in the relationship of leader network centrality and team performance as moderated by team size. Based on a multi-source dataset of 542 employees and 71 team leaders, we found that leader centrality in advice-giving networks related positively to team performance in larger teams but negatively in smaller teams. Results supported the mediated moderation model via member collaboration in smaller teams, but not in larger teams.
