Measuring Cognitive Integration Processes in the Teams: Scale Development and Validation

Abstract

Collective cognition in contemporary teamwork increasingly mandates the use of complex communication processes, such as information elaboration and ideas evaluation, to integrate the distributed expertise of members into joint, innovative solutions to multifaceted problems. This is particularly true of teams of expertise-diverse individuals, whose highly specialized members possess task-relevant perspectives that are intellectually distant from their teammates. While many communication behaviors associated with innovative outcomes have been documented, little is known about the underlying individual cognitive processes triggered during group interaction, such as knowledge evaluation, that subsequently influences collective creative output. This theoretical gap is due in part to the limited measurement alternatives with which to assess specific changes in the minds of team members before team-level innovation, including the extent to which they consider or incorporate their teammates’ perspectives–their cognitive integrative capability index (CICI). To address this, we conducted a three-phase, five-study investigation using four independent samples of online respondents, student, and professional interdisciplinary teams to create a valid, reliable, and generalizable measure of CICI. The results of Studies 1-3 demonstrate that it is composed of two dimensions: knowledge consideration and knowledge accommodation/assimilation, while Study 4 reveals its meaningful associations with extant constructs. Lastly, Study 5 demonstrates that the CICI scale can act as a mediator between communication behaviors and innovation in medical interdisciplinary research teams (IDR).