Team Adaptation Under Inconsistent Team Rewards

Abstract

Organizations use teams as an adaptive and flexible response to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Team adaptive performance, which is team performance under changing environmental conditions, can be facilitated by motivational mechanisms. In this paper, we investigated the effect of team rewards on team adaptive performance. Noting the temporal nature of team adaptation and emergent states, we hypothesized that team reward consistency over time (as compared to inconsistency) would result in higher team adaptive performance. We further posited that team efficacy beliefs and team distributive fairness perceptions would partially mediate this relationship. We used a between-subjects (team reward condition: consistent or inconsistent) experimental study with 43 3-person student teams who performed a coordination task with a change in the task at the midpoint. The empirical results supported our predictions. Team reward consistency led to higher team adaptive performance. Team distributive fairness perceptions fully mediated this relationship. Team reward consistency also resulted in higher team efficacy beliefs, which also contributed to team adaptive performance. Thus, our paper highlights the importance of team rewards on team adaptation.