How Team Structure Can Enhance Performance: Team Longevity's Moderating Effect and Team Coordination's Mediating Effect.

Hao Ji,Jin Yan

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01873

Abstract

Teams are more or less structured in function. Whether team structure is beneficial or harmful for the teams entail debates in current literature. Past studies mainly investigate the effects of team structure through learning or creativity. In this study, we tend to examine the effect of team structure on team performance through team coordination. We conducted two independent field studies with samples of 56 and 67 work teams to test our hypotheses. In both two substudies, we found team structure positively affect team performance by improving team coordination. Moreover, we found team longevity was able to moderate the relationship between team structure and team performance through team coordination, such that the positive relationship between team structure and team coordination were more significant when team longevity was high rather than low.

Highlights

Teams have been considered as fundamental units in today’s organizations (Mathieu et al, 2014)
Recent studies suggest that teams usually employ structural elements to guide or coordinate their work. They are likely to elect a leader to monitor individual team member work, divide collective work among team members, and set rules or procedures for teamwork, including deadlines for tasks (e.g., Langfred, 2007; Bunderson and Boumgarden, 2010; Conaldi and Lomi, 2013; Meyer et al, 2017). These structural elements have been defined as team structure, which refers to the extent to which specialization, hierarchy and routines and/or rules are clearly defined within the team (Bunderson and Boumgarden, 2010)
To compare the mediated effect of team coordination and team learning on the relationship between team structure and team performance, we investigated both the coordination and learning mechanism in study 2

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Teams have been considered as fundamental units in today’s organizations (Mathieu et al, 2014). A high level of team structure is likely to help teams define team members’ roles and ranks, divide the labor, and establish routines and plans for effective, collective work (Bunderson and Boumgarden, 2010). In such cases, team members have a clear understanding of their responsibilities, team goals and the team’s work schedule. Even though our results of ICC(2) were similar to team research with small samples (e.g., Koopmann et al, 2016; Mitchell et al, 2012), these values of ICC(2) were rather low in study 1

Team performance

10. Team performance

DISCUSSION

ETHICS STATEMENT

LIMITATIONS

CONCLUSION