Team Tenure Research Articles

Effort Gains in Occupational Teams - The Effects of Social Competition and Social Indispensability.

Laboratory research has demonstrated social competition and social indispensability as potential triggers of effort gains in teams as compared to working alone. However, it is unclear whether such effects are also relevant for existing occupational teams, collaborating for longer time intervals and achieving meaningful outcomes. We assumed that social indispensability effects are prevalent and stable in occupational teams, whereas social competition effects should mainly be effective in the beginning of teamwork and fade out over time. Hypotheses were confirmed in two studies using within-subjects designs with employees recruited via an online panel (Study 1, N = 137) and in software development companies (Study 2, N = 70). By means of the Event Reconstruction Method, participants re-experienced specific events from past working days (three events working alone, three teamwork events), and rated their effort separately for these events. In both studies, multilevel analyses revealed significant effort gains in teams when event-specific social indispensability was high. These effects were mediated by positive mood and perceived task meaningfulness, and additionally qualified by employees’ preference for teamwork. In contrast, motivating effects due to event-specific social competition were only observed for teams with short as compared to long team tenure in Study 2.

Top Management Team Tenure Diversity and Performance: The Moderating Role of Behavioral Integration

Integrating insights from organizational information processing theory and social categorization theory, we examine how top management team (TMT) tenure diversity affects team performance. We propose a theoretical framework that examines how these two conflicting processes occur simultaneously within diverse TMTs by arguing that TMT tenure variety influences information processing while TMT tenure separation influences the social categorization process. We argue for the presence of nonlinear relationships between tenure variety, tenure separation, and team performance. Furthermore, we propose that these relationships are moderated by the level of TMT behavioral integration. Based on a sample of 357 senior managers from 126 firms in China, we find that both TMT tenure variety and TMT tenure separation have opposing and nonlinear relationships with TMT performance, and the relationship between TMT tenure separation and TMT performance is moderated by the level of TMT behavioral integration. Our results help clarify the conflicting conclusions of previous TMT tenure diversity research. Our findings suggest that the effect of diversity depends on the type of diversity as they affect different processes. Our findings also explain how the opposing effects of both information processing and social categorization can occur simultaneously in the TMT. Furthermore, the effects of both processes are not linear while the level of diversity variety and diversity separation can affect the marginal effects. Finally, TMT behavioral integration processes affect how tenure diversity plays its role in team performance.

A conceptual framework and meta-analysis of the relationship of team tenure with team performance

While team tenure is a key component of models of group development and effectiveness, the nature of the relationship between tenure and team outcomes is unclear due to inconsistencies in empirical findings, theoretical conceptualizations of how to define and operationalize tenure, and contextual factors that influence the effect of tenure on performance. The primary purpose of our study is to put forth a framework of team tenure that clarifies the relationship between the various conceptualizations of tenure and team performance and to meta-analyze the relationship between team tenure and team performance. Overall, our results show that team tenure, measured as additive, collective, and dispersion, is positively related to team performance, but not to team innovation. For team tenure, relative weights analysis found additive team tenure to be a relatively more important predictor than collective or dispersion. Physical, rather than intellectual, work was found to strengthen the relationship between performance and additive and collective tenure. Tenure was more important for additive and collective performance for when tenure was measured for team member’s jobs. The relationship between additive team tenure and team performance was stronger for teams with low skill differentiation. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and research.

Teams’ innovation: getting there through knowledge sharing and absorptive capacity

This study addresses the contribution of knowledge sharing behaviour and absorptive capacity to innovation at team level. Although the hypotheses reflect the dominant literature, the study’s novelty lies in the data collected from several industries in Portugal, avoiding possible industry bias. Relationships are tested outside sectors where traditionally team effects are studied, for example healthcare. Data were collected from 141 employees working in organizational teams, excluding top management teams, which are often the object of research addressing phenomena leading to innovation. There is no evidence in support of organizational size effect, team’s geographic concentration effect or gender effect. However, team tenure duration is positively related to increased knowledge sharing, that is, recent teams do not share as much knowledge as older ones. Structural Equation Modelling was used to test the mediation effect of absorptive capacity between individual knowledge sharing behaviour and team innovation. Evidence in support of full mediation was found.

Untangling the relationship between strategic consistency and organizational performance: An empirical analysis of moderator variables

AbstractResearchers have advocated various perspectives on the relationship between strategic consistency and organizational performance. This inconclusive debate has created an inadequate theoretical foundation in strategic consistency literature. Therefore, the present study uses strategic planning, strategic change, upper echelons theory, and other literature as the theoretical foundation to empirically examine the moderating roles of organizational slack, environmental dynamism, and top management team attributes in the relationship between strategic consistency and organizational performance. Using 439 electronics companies in the Taiwanese stock market as sample data, the empirical results show that organizational slack, environmental dynamism, top management team tenure, and top management team tenure heterogeneity moderate the relationship between strategic consistency and organizational performance.

Top management team (TMT) tenure diversity and firm performance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate the effect of top management team (TMT) tenure diversity and firm financial performance (return on equity [ROE], return on assets [ROA]), and, second, to examine the moderating effect of TMT average age between TMT tenure diversity and firm performance.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presented results from a quantitative study of 744 TMTs in Japanese manufacturing firms. The multiple hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.FindingsThe results show that TMT tenure diversity had a negative and significant main effect on ROE but not ROA. Furthermore, the results also indicated that the negative relationship between TMT tenure diversity and firm performance was attenuated by having older TMTs.Originality/valueFirst, this paper expands scope of research on TMT diversity, which has hitherto primarily on non-individualistic variables (such as industry setting) by examining the moderating role of an individualistic variable (TMT average age). Second, this paper extended the attempts to apply the age-related theory by considering the role from the viewpoint of group level, namely, TMT average age.

Nonlinear effects of team tenure on team psychological safety climate and climate strength: Implications for average team member performance.

The teams literature suggests that team tenure improves team psychological safety climate and climate strength in a linear fashion, but the empirical findings to date have been mixed. Alternatively, theories of group formation suggest that new and longer tenured teams experience greater team psychological safety climate than moderately tenured teams. Adopting this second perspective, we used a sample of 115 research and development teams and found that team tenure had a curvilinear relationship with team psychological safety climate and climate strength. Supporting group formation theories, team psychological safety climate and climate strength were higher in new and longer tenured teams compared with moderately tenured teams. Moreover, we found a curvilinear relationship between team tenure and average team member creative performance as partially mediated by team psychological safety climate. Team psychological safety climate improved average team member task performance only when team psychological safety climate was strong. Likewise, team tenure influenced average team member task performance in a curvilinear manner via team psychological safety climate only when team psychological safety climate was strong. We discuss theoretical and practical implications and offer several directions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record

Way different, never work together? A moderated model of informational faultlines, overlapping team tenure, transactive memory system, and team learning

Way different, never work together? A moderated model of informational faultlines, overlapping team tenure, transactive memory system, and team learning

Innovation in Stroke Care Quality: NIH Stroke Scale Change and Shewhart Charts.

Stroke care, admission through discharge, is a process that should lead to symptomatic improvement. Improvement or decline in conditions of patients with acute stroke during hospitalization can be measured by the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIH Stroke Scale or NIHSS) at both admission and discharge and may indicate the overall quality of acute stroke care for a patient and the stability of care in the system. Shewhart control charts were analyzed for 98 patients with stroke admissions in a random sample at a tertiary care stroke center to determine the feasibility of examining the NIHSS score change to detect statistical control or identify excess variance in outcomes. The study sample showed a mean improvement of 1.33 points from admission to discharge on the NIHSS. Three statistical outliers were found. Excess statistical variation clustered within a specific stroke team's tenure suggested a need for targeted education and examination for process redesign. Using the NIHSS and the Shewhart control charts identified a systematic process flaw that could be targeted to improve stroke outcomes and move the delivery system toward statistical control.

Board and senior management alignment on school strategy

This study examines the degree to which senior executive members of a school’s decision-making team (senior management team and board of directors) are aligned on fundamental principles of school strategy. Our study is based on a conceptual framework of strategic leadership as it applies in an Australian independent school context. We also examine the differences between the senior management team and board of directors based on top management team (TMT) tenure heterogeneity, and how these differences account for TMT associations with school strategy. Implications for research and practice complete the study. The terms top management team, senior management team, and senior leadership team are used interchangeably in this article.

Management Team Incentive: Dispersion and Firm Performance

ABSTRACT Recent theory suggests that firms incorporate synergistic interrelationships among executives into optimal incentive design (Edmans, Goldstein, and Zhu 2013). We focus on Pay Performance Sensitivities (PPS) and use dispersion in PPS across top executives as a proxy for the incentive design component shaped by an executive team's synergy profile. We model optimal PPS dispersion and use residuals from this model to measure deviations from optimal. We find that firm performance is increasing (decreasing) in the residual when PPS dispersion is too low (too high). We conjecture that deviations from optimal are sustained by adjustment costs, finding that firms only close around 60 percent of the gap between target and actual PPS dispersion over the subsequent year. Viewing a team's equity grants as a vector, we provide evidence that firms use subsequent equity grants to actively manage PPS dispersion toward optimality. Cross-sectional analysis reveals that the deleterious effect of deviations from optimal is decreasing in the duration of a team's tenure together, and increasing in the importance of effort coordination across team members for firm performance. JEL Classifications: M41.

'There's only one enabler; come up, help us': staff perspectives of barriers and enablers to continuous quality improvement in Aboriginal primary health-care settings in South Australia.

This paper presents the findings from a qualitative study, which sought to investigate the barriers and enablers to implementation of a continuous quality improvement (CQI) program by health-care professionals in Aboriginal primary health-care services in South Australia. Eighteen semi-structured interviews across 11 participating services were conducted alongside CQI implementation activities. Multiple barriers exist, from staff perspectives, which can be categorised according to different levels of the primary health-care system. At the macro level, barriers related to resource constraints (workforce issues) and access to project support (CQI coordinator). At the meso level, barriers related to senior level management and leadership for quality improvement and the level of organisational readiness. At the micro level, knowledge and attitudes of staff (such as resistance to change; lack of awareness of CQI) and lack of team tenure were cited as the main barriers to implementation. Staff identified that successful and sustained implementation of CQI requires both organisational systems and individual behaviour change. Improvements through continuing regional level collaborations and using a systems approach to develop an integrated regional level CQI framework, which includes building organisational and clinic team CQI capacity at the health centre level, are recommended. Ideally, this should be supported at the broader national level with dedicated funding.

Group Norms in Youth Sport: Role of Personal and Social Factors

The purpose of this study was to investigate youth athletes’ perceptions of group norms for competition, practice, and social setting contexts in relation to personal and social factors. A secondary purpose of this study was to examine the interactions of the personal and situation factors on perceptions of group norms. Participants included 424 athletes from 35 high school sport teams who completed a survey assessing team norms in competition, practice, and social settings. Multilevel analysis results revealed differences in group norms by gender as well as gender by team tenure and gender by sport type interactions. Female teams held higher perceptions of norms for competition, practice, and social settings than male teams. Interactions between gender and team tenure and gender and sport type revealed significant differences in practice norms. No differences were found in norms by group size. The findings suggest that examining the characteristics of the team members (i.e., gender, team tenure) and team (i.e., type of sport) may enhance our understanding of group norms in a youth sport setting.

When Should We Disagree? The Effect of Relationship Conflict on Team Identity in East Asian and North American Teams

Along with recent research uncovering distinctly Asian approaches to conflict management, we examine the experience and effect of relationship conflict on team identity in culturally homogeneous North American versus East Asian teams. In a longitudinal field experiment with student teams, we found that East Asian teams, compared to North American teams, experienced more relationship conflict at later stages of team tenure. We further found that, while relationship conflict undermined team identity in North American teams, relationship conflict did not influence team identity in East Asian teams. Our study counterintuitively finds that East Asian teams may be less influenced by relationship conflict than North American teams, despite their relationship maintenance orientation. We present several possible future avenues to unpack the psychological mechanisms underlying the distinct temporal patterns and outcome effects of relationship conflict in East Asian teams and implications for cross-cultural East Asian and North American teams.

The shared leadership of teams: A meta-analysis of proximal, distal, and moderating relationships

The current meta-analysis examines the relationship between shared leadership and team performance. It also assesses the role of team confidence (i.e., collective efficacy and team potency) in this relationship. Mediation analyses supported the hypothesis that team confidence partially mediates the effects of shared leadership on team performance. We also found support for the notion that shared leadership explains unique variance in team performance, over and above that of vertical leadership. Furthermore, a variety of substantive continuous and categorical variables were investigated as moderators of the shared leadership–team performance relationship. Specifically, the relationship between shared leadership and team performance was moderated by task interdependence, team tenure, and whether performance was objectively versus subjectively measured. Finally, results suggest that the approach used when measuring shared leadership can also play a role in the observed validity. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Impacts of information-providers’ perceived cultural backgrounds on information-seeking behaviors: Investigation of American employees’ information-seeking behaviors in a Korean multinational corporation in the US

This current study examined how employees’ perception of information-providers’ cultural backgrounds impact the patterns of seeking information from culturally different sources. For this examination, this study looked into the information-seeking behaviors in a Korean multinational corporation in the US. Results from paired t-tests and a series of hierarchical regression analyses showed the following meaningful findings: (a) American employees’ information-seeking behaviors were more strongly discouraged by the perceived power distance for Korean expatriates, compared to the influence of the power distance for American supervisors, and (b) after controlling for gender, organizational tenure, and team tenure, American employees’ monitoring of feedback information and their inquiry of task information from direct supervisors positively and significantly predicted communication satisfaction with the information source.

Antecedents of relationship conflict in top management teams

Purpose– The aim of this paper is to analyze the influence of two categories of conflict antecedents – input and behavior antecedents – on the level of relationship conflict (RC) in top management teams (TMTs). The authors apply a process view to conflict, and consider that the effect of the input antecedents on RC may be mediated by a behavioral antecedent: behavioral integration.Design/methodology/approach– Using a survey instrument, multi-informant data were collected from 64 TMTs. An aggregation and measurement analysis was performed. To test the hypotheses of mediation, bootstrapping procedures were used.Findings– The results show that the effects of team tenure, intragroup trust and value consensus on relationship conflict are mediated by behavioral integration. However, TMT size does not affect relationship conflict – either directly or indirectly – through behavioral integration.Research limitations/implications– It is concluded that encouraging intragroup trust and value consensus among TMT members facilitates the integrated behavior of the team. This behavioral integration may allow conflict to be constructive. Therefore, firms should make an effort to encourage this psychological context.Originality/value– Previous research about the antecedents of RC in the field of TMTs is inconclusive. Additionally, a new approach to conflict antecedents is considered, to establish a direct and independent relationship between different categories of antecedents and TMT conflict. A relationship of interdependence is considered between different types of antecedents and their effects on RC.

The effect of management team characteristics on performance and style extremity of mutual fund portfolios

Purpose: Along with mutual funds’ scale and quantity expanding for our country, it is common for fund management companies hiring new managers or the original fund managers mobilizing from one to another. The high liquidity of fund managers makes different managers regroup to manage the funds that belong to the same fund management company in each fund year. The characteristics of these different management team will influence the fund performance, and also affect the earnings of the fund management company and portfolio investors. The purpose of this paper is as follows. First, evaluating the effect of management team characteristics on portfolio characteristics: risk, performance, and extremity. Second, testing the hypothesis that the ranking of mid-year performance have effect on investment style extremity and research what relationship exists between this phenomenon and management team characteristics in depth. Design/methodology/approach: On the analysis of the relationships between the management team characteristics and portfolio characteristics, a series of OLS regressions is run where the time series regression model (the factor model) and cross-sectional regression are included based on using the STATA, EVIEWS and MATLAB. The validity and practicability of the model will be verified in the paper. All of the above are aimed at achieving portfolio optimization and realizing the maximization of the interests of fund management companies and investors. Findings: The main findings are as follows. Teams with more doctors or MBA (CPA and CFA) hold more risky portfolios, while teams with long team tenure hold less. More members and large gender diversity have negative effect on performance, and the opposite is age diversity. Teams with more members and long tenure tend to hold less extreme style decisions, but age diversity is related to more. Besides, tournament hypothesis does exist in China investment funds industry especially when the economy is in a downward phase, and fund managers are more likely to raise the risk of portfolio when their term is coming to an end. Practical implications: These findings have important implications for fund management companies as they try to form a highly efficient management team as well as for individual investors’ investment allocation decisions. Originality/value: This paper propose a new perspective to evaluate the relationship between the management team characteristics and portfolio characteristics, which focus on both sides investors rather than a single fund.

Team Tenure and Member Performance: The Roles of Psychological Safety Climate and Climate Strength

Current understanding of the effect of team tenure on team processes suggests that psychological safety climate and climate strength increase as team tenure increases. However, theoretical and empirical work contradicts this assumption. Specifically, team development theories suggest that teams encounter various interpersonal experiences throughout their tenure, making a linear relationship an unlikely description of team tenure’s relationship with psychological safety climate and climate strength. The primary purpose of this research is to develop and test theory that captures the complex way in which psychological safety climate and climate strength develop as a function of team tenure. We found that team tenure had a curvilinear relationship with psychological safety climate and climate strength. Shorter-tenured teams exhibited a negative relationship between team tenure and psychological safety climate and climate strength, whereas longer-tenured teams exhibited a positive relationship between team tenure and psychological safety climate and climate strength. Moreover, we considered whether the nonlinear effect of team tenure translates to affect member performance via psychological safety climate. We found that psychological safety climate was positively related to creative performance regardless of climate strength, whereas psychological safety climate was positively associated with job performance in strong climates but unassociated in weak climates.

Profiting from CEOs’ Empowerment of TMTs: Does the Social Context Matter?

This study enriches the research about team empowerment by focusing on top management teams (TMTs) and taking an aspect of social context into consideration: the relational demography between CEOs and team members. Using data from a multi-source survey in 129 Chinese organizations, we found that empowering leadership, which has primarily been examined at lower-level teams, was also important at the top executive level. CEOs’ empowerment of TMTs predicted superior organizational performance. This influence was found to be most beneficial when the CEO and TMT members differed in informational background but had long team tenure overlap (i.e., a three-way interaction). Introducing contextual contingencies and testing their influence broadens the understanding of the drivers of team performance and refines the guidance for practitioners regarding top team management.