Team Task Performance Research Articles

LEADERSHIP IN HYBRID WORK TEAMS: IMPACT OF TRANSFORMATIONAL AND AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP ON RELATIONSHIPS AND TASK PERFORMANCE IN STUDENT TEAMS

Transformational and authentic leadership have caught researchers’ attention, and it has gained recognition and position within leadership studies. This quantitative research aims to measure the correlation between leaders' transformational and authentic leadership in interpersonal relationships and task performance perceived by their hybrid work teams. For this quantitative research, four previously investigated and validated instruments were utilized: the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) Avolio et al. (2007), which has an acceptable internal consistency reported with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from .66 to .93; the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X) Bass and Avolio (1994), known for its high reliability with a reported Cronbach's alpha of 0.71; the HQIR: High-Quality Interpersonal Relationships Questionnaire (Carmeli et al., 2009), which also exhibits high reliability with a reported Cronbach’s alpha of 0.93; and the Individual Work Performance Questionnaire (IWPQ) Koopmans et al. (2011), with Cronbach's alpha values ranging from 0.77 to 0.83, and which will be used with a common translation into Latin American Spanish. Using a sample of 156 participants who are members of student hybrid teams (N = 156), the findings of this study demonstrated a positive correlation between transformational leadership and both interpersonal relationships and task performance in hybrid work teams. This study represents one of the first investigations of transformational and authentic leadership and its correlation with interpersonal relationships and task performance in Latin America, and it has some leadership implications within hybrid work teams.

Empirical Impacts of Independent and Collaborative Training on Task Performance and Improvement in Human-AI Teams

Empirical Impacts of Independent and Collaborative Training on Task Performance and Improvement in Human-AI Teams

What you say vs what you do: Utilizing positive emotional expressions to relay AI teammate intent within human–AI teams

With the expansive growth of AI’s capabilities in recent years, researchers have been tasked with developing and improving human-centered AI collaborations, necessitating the creation of human–AI teams (HATs). However, the differences in communication styles between humans and AI often prevent human teammates from fully understanding the intent and needs of AI teammates. One core difference is that humans naturally leverage a positive emotional tone during communication to convey their confidence or lack thereof to convey doubt in their ability to complete a task. Yet, this communication strategy must be explicitly designed in order for an AI teammate to be human-centered. In this mixed-methods study, 45 participants completed a study examining how human teammates interpret the behaviors of their AI teammates when they express different positive emotions via specific words/phrases. Quantitative results show that, based on corresponding behaviors, AI teammates were able to use displays of emotion to increase trust in AI teammates and the positive mood of the human teammate. Additionally, our qualitative findings indicate that participants preferred their AI teammates to increase the intensity of their displayed emotions to help reduce the perceived risk of their AI teammate’s behavior. When taken in sum, these findings describe the relevance of AI teammates expressing intensities of emotion while performing various behavioral decisions as a continued means to provide social support to the wider team and better task performance.

Interdependence in Virtual Teams—A Double-Edged Sword?

To address the increased need of understanding how interdependence affects virtual team performance, we experimentally manipulated process interdependence and resource interdependence in 102 virtual teams. We examined effects on team processes and team task and creative performance. Increased process interdependence improved both types of team performance, whereas resource interdependence decreased creative performance. Further, process interdependence was most beneficial for task performance when resource interdependence was low. Contrary to expectations, team processes did not mediate these relationships. We contribute to a fuller understanding of how interdependence influences key performance criteria in virtual teams and provide practical implications for designing virtual teamwork.

All Human Versus Human-Robot Teaming: Measuring Neurophysiological Synchrony, Team Performance, and Trust during Search and Rescue

This study used a multiplayer virtual environment simulating search and rescue to examine teaming behaviors and trust networks in two teaming conditions using the Wizard of Oz approach: (1) an all-human team (three humans) and (2) a human-robot team (two humans, one simulated quadruped robot). Neural, physiological, and subjective responses of trust and workload at the individual and team (e.g., neurophysiological synchrony) levels, along with task performance, were measured. We observed better task performance in human-robot teams and associated higher neural synchrony, but lower trust in the team and the robot agent. Trust between the human dyads remained intact. These findings provide insights into comparing the neural bases of complex and social interactions in all-human versus human-autonomy teams.

Does It MultiMatch? What Scanpath Comparison Tells us About Task Performance in Teams

Teamwork and collaboration form the cornerstones of organizational performance and success. It is important to understand how the attention allocation of team members is linked to performance. One approach to studying attention allocation in a team context is to compare the scanpath similarity of two people working in teams and to explore the link between scanpath similarity and team performance. In this study, participants were recruited to work in pairs on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) task that included low and high workload conditions. An eye tracker was used to collect the eye movements of both participants in each team. The scanpaths of two teammates were compared in low and high workload conditions using MultiMatch, an established scanpath comparison algorithm. The obtained scanpath similarity values were correlated with performance measures of response time and accuracy. Several MultiMatch measures showed significant strong correlations across multiple dimensions, providing insight into team behavior and attention allocation. The results suggested that the more similar each team member’s scanpath is, the better their performance. Additional research and consideration of experimental variables will be necessary to further understand how best to use MultiMatch for scanpath similarity assessment in complex domains.

Under (peer) pressure: Experimental evidence on team size and task performance

AbstractCausal evidence for the effect of team size on performance is lacking despite the high relevance of this question. From an economic perspective, one would expect performance incentives to decrease with increasing team size, but the psychological phenomenon of peer effects could mitigate the free‐rider problem. To analyze the behavioral implications due to changes in team size, we exploit a rich dataset from a controlled experiment with teams of either two or three participants of a university research project performing a real‐effort task. Our study provides three main findings. First, increasing team size does not change team performance on average, which is a robust result, be it across performance dimensions and even when introducing pay inequality between two work periods. Second, positive performance spillovers from peer to peer alleviate the free‐rider problem when team size increases. Third, changes in peer pressure due to changes in the transparency of others' performance could explain the variation in peer effects across team size. In contrast to discussions in previous literature, our evidence points to a potentially negative role of peer pressure for team performance. While lower peer pressure in teams of three allows for more positive performance spillovers, a high‐skilled peer in a team of two seems to pressure the other team member to produce more mistakes instead of more work output in high quality.

The more the merrier or too many cooks spoil the pot? A meta‐analytic examination of team size and team effectiveness

SummaryScholars often implicitly assume that team size is associated with team effectiveness, but there is evidence of meaningful variability in this relationship that may correspond with competing theoretical perspectives. In particular, positive effect sizes between team size and team effectiveness correspond with a human capital perspective; negative effect sizes correspond with a process loss perspective. This study tests a series of contextual moderators aimed at evaluating these competing theories. Our team‐level meta‐analysis (k = 208, N = 21 435) confirmed a null, yet extremely variable, relationship ( = .00) between team size and team task performance. Importantly, we find support for both theoretical perspectives through our moderator analyses, with team size being more strongly associated with performance when tasks are complex, consistent with a human capital perspective, but less strongly associated with performance when high coordination requirements are coupled with low task complexity, consistent with a process loss perspective. Contrary to our expectations, the relationship between team size and team task performance did not vary as a function of national culture. Meta‐analyses of associations between team size and other team‐level effectiveness indicators revealed connections with deviant behaviors ( = .17) and passive withdrawal behaviors ( = .13) and a small negative relationship ( = −.04) with team attitudes. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Interpersonal Relations and Task Performance

Purpose: The study draws on the social network theory to examine the influence of interpersonal relations on the task performance at the individual employee, team and divisional levels in the Nigerian Police Force.
 Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted a cross sectional survey design and a sample of 556 police men was selected through the application of multi-stage sampling procedures. The data collection instrument was designed in line with the 5-point Likert scale while the instrument was validated through content validity approach and the reliability of the instrument is determined using the test-retest method.
 Findings: Data were collected through the self-report of the policemen while analysis was carried out using descriptive statistics, run mean test and Chi-square test and the results indicated that interpersonal relations influence employee, team and divisional task performance in the Nigerian Police Force.
 Practical implications: We recommended that instrumental ties and social communities in the fabric of the Nigerian Police Force should be promoted to further advance the critical roles of crime fighting and prevention with a view to reducing criminality in Nigeria. 
 Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this research is original and adds new value to the field by being the first of its kind.
 Paper type: Research paper

Physiological Synchrony Predict Task Performance and Negative Emotional State during a Three-Member Collaborative Task.

Evaluation of team performance in naturalistic contexts has gained popularity during the last two decades. Among other human factors, physiological synchrony has been adopted to investigate team performance and emotional state when engaged in collaborative team tasks. A variety of methods have been reported to quantify physiological synchrony with a varying degree of correlation with the collaborative team task performance and emotional state, reflected in the inconclusive nature of findings. Little is known about the effect of the choice of synchrony calculation methods and the level of analysis on these findings. In this research work, we investigate the relationship between outcomes of different methods to quantify physiological synchrony, emotional state, and team performance of three-member teams performing a collaborative team task. The proposed research work employs dyadic-level linear (cross-correlation) and team-level non-linear (multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis) synchrony calculation measures to quantify task performance and the emotional state of the team. Our investigation indicates that the physiological synchrony estimated using multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis revealed a significant negative relationship between the subjectively reported frustration levels and overall task performance. However, no relationship was found between cross-correlation-based physiological synchrony and task performance. The proposed research highlights that the method of choice for physiological synchrony calculation has direct impact on the derived relationship of team task performance and emotional states.

The influence of cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence on conflict occurrence and performance in global virtual teams

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.

Economic analysis on the causes of mental health stress of enterprise employees based on emotional feature clustering.

Emotional labor generally exists in organization members. Emotional labor will not only affect employees’ interpersonal relationships, but also affect employees’ mental health. Affected by many factors such as the economic environment, they often need to bear multiple pressures. The degree of stress is positively correlated with the depth of the development of the times and people’s education. As mental health research has become the frontier and hot spot in the field of psychology, the role of mental health in the process of employee creativity has been paid more and more attention. Therefore, this paper proposes a study on the causes of employees’ psychological stress based on emotional feature clustering. Based on the clustering of emotional characteristics, this paper analyzes the causes of employees’ mental health stress from an economic perspective. For teams with low level of team openness, with the improvement of team heterogeneity, team task performance shows a slight upward trend. It is clear from the experiment that when the number of experiments reaches 100, the task performance of high atmosphere level is 12.14, while the task performance of low atmosphere level is only 9.89. Therefore, the atmosphere of team employees is very important to team task performance. Through the cluster analysis of employees’ mental health characteristics, it not only increases employees’ spare time life, but also reduces employees’ daily contradictions. It eases the work pressure of employees, and becomes a platform for employees to improve their awareness and a promoter of harmonious employee relations.

An integration-and-learning perspective on gender diversity in self-managing teams: The roles of learning goal orientation and shared leadership.

Contemporary organizations commonly use self-managing teams to structure work as a way to achieve competitive advantage. Although diversity on visible demographic characteristics-such as gender-is a critical determinant of team functioning, our knowledge about when and how gender diversity affects performance in self-managing teams is still nascent. Building upon the integration-and-learning perspective and recent developments in the information and decision-making approach on diversity, we investigate when (team learning goal orientation as a contingency factor) and how (shared leadership as a structural mediating mechanism) gender diversity benefits task performance in self-managing teams. We conducted two studies to test our hypotheses. In Study 1, we studied 66 teams that participated in a team simulation. As expected, we found that team learning goal orientation acted as a boundary condition qualifying the effect of gender diversity on self-managing team task performance, such that gender diversity benefited task performance for teams that were higher (vs. lower) in learning goal orientation. In Study 2, we tested shared leadership as a mediating mechanism via which gender diversity benefited team task performance in learning-goal-oriented teams. We surveyed 67 teams multiple times over the span of 6 months, and found that gender diversity benefited the task role enactment of teams with higher (vs. lower) learning goal orientation through shared leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Temporal leadership, team processes, and project team task performance

We disaggregate the overall conceptualization of temporal leadership into its two foundation facets: temporal planning and temporal reminders. We integrate these with a two-phase model of team processes during a time-limited project. Specifically, we suggest that leader temporal planning facilitates team transition processes early in a project, leader temporal reminders facilitate team action processes in the middle of the project, and both team processes mediate the effects of leader behavior on team task performance at the end of the project. Data were collected from the members of 51 teams at three points during an application development project and from team leaders at the conclusion of the project. As hypothesized, team transition processes mediated the relationship between leader temporal planning at project initiation and final team task performance. Leader temporal reminders predicted team action processes during project execution. However, team action processes failed to mediate the relationship between leader temporal reminders at the project midpoint and final task performance. We conclude with practical implications for project managers and suggestions for future research.

Why and When Differentiated Empowering Leadership Hurts Team Performance

The empowering leadership literature supports that empowering can result in a host of positive outcomes for work teams. These findings, however, largely assume that leaders uniformly empower their followers and have not considered the potential consequences that occur when leaders differentially empower members of the same team. In the present study, we develop a theoretical model to delineate why and when differentiated empowering leadership affects two types of team performance: team task performance and creative performance. Drawing from social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954), we position differentiated empowering leadership as adversely affecting team information sharing and subsequent team task and creative performance. Moreover, we propose the indirect effect of differentiated empowering leadership on team performance via team knowledge sharing is conditional on tenure diversity. To test our proposed model, we conducted a three-wave field study with a sample of 74 teams and their team leaders from 17 firms in South Korea. The results suggest that differentiated empowering leadership negatively affects team task and creative performance through a negative effect on team information sharing. The negative indirect effect of differentiated empowering leadership on team performance was stronger in teams where tenure diversity was low, compared to when it was high.

Leader subjective ambivalence: Enabling team task performance via information‐seeking processes

AbstractIn this article, we investigate the effects of leader subjective ambivalence on team performance. Integrating the ambivalence literature and social learning theory, we propose a multi‐level model of whether, when, and why team leaders’ subjective ambivalence enhances team performance outcomes. The results of two laboratory experiments (Studies 1 and 2) demonstrate initial support for the relationship between leader subjective ambivalence and information‐seeking behaviors. The results of a longitudinal field study (Study 3) based on 164 projects (164 leaders and 725 subordinates) show that leader subjective ambivalence has a positive indirect effect on team task performance first through leader information‐seeking behaviors and later through team information‐seeking behaviors. Our results further indicate that project complexity is a boundary condition for the proposed conditional indirect effect of leader subjective ambivalence on team performance outcomes. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

A Team-Based Leadership Framework—The Interplay of Leadership Self-Efficacy, Power, Collaboration and Teamwork Processes Influencing Team Performance

This study identified a framework of team-based leadership facing the change of future requirements of agile organizations and new work and aims to clarify the underlying mechanisms and how they work together and under what conditions. Data were collected from leaders in three separate surveys characterized by various countries, first languages and different ethnicity. A total of 401 completed interviews were collected and the results were analyzed at the individual level. All variables were modeled in a path diagram and tested applying structural equation modeling. The results show that leadership self-efficacy is a key mechanism that let team-based leadership emerge. Leadership self-efficacy is related to personal power, collaboration, teamwork processes and team task performance, but there is no direct effect on team contextual performance. Personal power is correlated with team task performance. Positional power is interrelated with team contextual performance and personal power. Teamwork processes partially mediate the relation between leadership self-efficacy and team task performance as well as team contextual performance. The study findings identified that the leader role perception by teammates can affect personal power and that organizational politics, expressions of narcissists personal characteristics or cross-cultural context dependency can have an impact on positional power. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed, together with limitations and recommendations for future research.

Meeting the Challenge of Transmission Delay: Communication Protocols for Space Operations.

Several studies were conducted to assess media-specific communication protocols as a countermeasure to challenges of asynchronous space-ground communication. Previous research demonstrated that transmission delay can negatively impact space-ground communication, collaboration, and task performance. We created media-specific protocols designed to mitigate identified problems associated with asynchronous communication and examined their effects on team communication and task performance. The lab study included 24 teams of three who collaborated remotely via voice or text on computer-based tasks simulating failures in a spacecraft's life support system. Training and availability of communication protocols was the between-groups variable. Perceived usability, criticality, and effectiveness of the communication protocols were also assessed in space-analog simulations. Lab study data revealed that communication protocols facilitated some aspects of team communication; specifically, they reduced threats to common ground and information splitting but not instances of miscommunication. Analog data indicated that protocol compliance was high, participants evaluated most elements as highly important, and protocols maintained perceived communication effectiveness between space crews and mission control during time delay comparably to no-time-delay conditions. Converging data attest to the feasibility, usability, and effectiveness of empirically derived communication protocols as a countermeasure to the negative impacts of transmission delay and also point to technological solutions. The communication protocols have been adopted for training in NASA analog simulations involving time-delayed communication. They could also support communication among remote team members in medical operations, command-and-control teams, or disaster response under asynchronous conditions or when time is limited and precise communication is critical.

Factors Influencing Team and Task Performance in Intensive Care Teams in a Simulated Scenario: Erratum.

Factors Influencing Team and Task Performance in Intensive Care Teams in a Simulated Scenario: Erratum.

Empowering leadership and leadership effectiveness: A meta-analytic examination

<p id="p00010">With the ever-changing organizational environment, more and more business managers choose to empower their subordinates in exchange for more responsibilities and better performance, in order to help companies gain sustainable competitive advantages. For this reason, empowering leadership has received extensive attention from management practitioners and academic researchers, and has achieved fruitful research results. However, there are still have some disagreements about the effectiveness of empowering leadership in Chinese and foreign studies. Although Kim et al. (<xref xml:base="bibr" rid="b152">2018</xref>) and Lee et al. (<xref xml:base="bibr" rid="b167">2018</xref>) took the lead in conducting meta-analysis research on the impact of empowering leadership, their research objects were limited to English literature before 2016, and the samples based on the Chinese context were seriously small. As the second largest economy in the world and the “Cultural suzerain” of the Confucian Culture Cluster, China has a huge number of enterprises and labor force. Therefore, the meta-analysis should fully absorb research samples based on the Chinese context to more truly reflect the effectiveness of empowering leadership. <p id="p00010">Based on 183 empirical studies (120 in English and 63 in Chinese), the authors use meta-analysis method to comprehensively examine the relationship between empowering leadership and leadership effectiveness, including individual work attitudes and individual performance (145 samples, 50509 employees), team performance (47 samples, 4856 teams) and organizational performance (9 samples, 1090 companies). The research results show that empowering leadership is significantly positively correlated with individual positive work attitudes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and subjective well-being), and significantly negatively correlated with individual negative work attitudes (turnover tendency, burnout &amp; stress), and significantly positively correlated with individual (team) performance and its various dimensions, and is significantly negatively correlated with individual counterproductive behavior, but the positive correlation with organizational performance is not significant. Among them, the sample literatures of subjective well-being, team performance and team task performance may have publication bias, so that the meta-analysis results of empowering leadership with these variables are likely to be overestimated. In addition, the authors also examine the boundary effects of sample differences between East and West, measurement scales of empowering leadership, types of research data, and industry types of research sample on the relationship between empowering leadership and some performance indicators. <p id="p00010">In terms of the differences between the Eastern and Western samples, the correlation between empowering leadership and individual (team) performance and individual (team) task performance are stronger in the East Asian samples and weaker in the European and American samples, but its relationship with individual (team) innovation performance and individual (team) contextual performance has no significant difference. However, the western sample of team innovation performance and the East Asian sample of team contextual performance are only one, so that the meta-analysis results of East-West comparison about team innovation performance and team contextual performance may be unstable and unreliable. In addition, the measurement scale of empowering leadership and types of research data are significantly moderated the relationship between empowering leadership and individual performance, but the industry types of research sample had no significant moderating effect on the relationship between empowering leadership and individual performance. The conclusion of this study provides a more comprehensive stage conclusion for the research on effectiveness of empowering leadership.