When discretionary boundary spanning relationships cease becoming discretionary: The impact of closed ties on informal leadership perceptions.

Organizations have recognized that effective informal leadership is a source of competitive advantage and invest heavily in leadership development efforts. Moreover, because of historical shifts in the nature of work, this informal leadership often takes the form of inter-unit boundary spanning. Because of these two developments, discretionary boundary spanning (DBS) between units has increasingly become a critical, dynamic, bottom-up activity where individuals lacking formal authority step up and take on informal leadership responsibilities. In this study, we draw upon Simmelian Tie Theory (STT) to examine the relationship between different types of DBS and formal leaders' perceptions of a subordinate's informal leadership and performance. We empirically document that a small number of closed task-oriented and closed friendship-oriented DBSs are instrumental in helping individuals demonstrate informal leadership. However, we also show that DBS places constraints on informal leadership when closed ties become too numerous. This results in an inverted-U relationship between the number of closed DBS ties and perceptions of leadership where the apex (i.e., point of over-embeddedness) emerges at a smaller number for friendship-oriented DBS relative to the apex for task-oriented DBSs. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results, as well as the practical implications for managers of organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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).

Wearable bluetooth sensors for capturing relational variables and temporal variability in relationships: A construct validation study.

The advent of wearable sensor technologies has the potential to transform organizational research by offering the unprecedented opportunity to collect continuous, objective, highly granular data over extended time periods. Recent evidence has demonstrated the potential utility of Bluetooth-enabled sensors, specifically, in identifying emergent networks via colocation signals in highly controlled contexts with known distances and groups. Although there is proof of concept that wearable Bluetooth sensors may be able to contribute to organizational research in highly controlled contexts, to date there has been no explicit psychometric construct validation effort dedicated to these sensors in field settings. Thus, the two studies described here represent the first attempt to formally evaluate longitudinal Bluetooth data streams generated in field settings, testing their ability to (a) show convergent validity with respect to traditional self-reports of relational data; (b) display discriminant validity with respect to qualitative differences in the nature of alternative relationships (i.e., advice vs. friendship); (c) document predictive validity with respect to performance; (d) decompose variance in network-related measures into meaningful within- and between-unit variability over time; and (e) complement retrospective self-reports of time spent with different groups where there is a "ground truth" criterion. Our results provide insights into the validity of Bluetooth signals with respect to capturing variables traditionally studied in organizational science and highlight how the continuous data collection capabilities made possible by wearable sensors can advance research far beyond that of the static perspectives imposed by traditional data collection strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

A century of work teams in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Work groups are a vital link between individuals and organizations. Systematic psychological research on the nature and effects of work groups dates back at least to the Hawthorne studies of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet little to none of this work appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology until the 1950s when groups were treated primarily as foils against which to compare the performance of individuals. From the 1990s to the present, the volume of research and the nature of topics addressing work group/teams expanded significantly. The authors review the evolution of team research over the past century with a particular focus on that which has appeared in this journal. They chronicle the shift from a focus on individuals within teams, or on individual versus team comparisons, to a focus on the team itself and larger systems of teams. They describe the major outcomes studied within this literature, and how they relate to the nature of team tasks and structures. Further, the authors consider the roles of team members' characteristics and composition, and team dynamics in terms of processes and emergent states. They close with a call for future research that models dynamic team relationships in context and as they operate in complex systems. (PsycINFO Database Record

Small sample mediation testing: misplaced confidence in bootstrapped confidence intervals.

Bootstrapping is an analytical tool commonly used in psychology to test the statistical significance of the indirect effect in mediation models. Bootstrapping proponents have particularly advocated for its use for samples of 20-80 cases. This advocacy has been heeded, especially in the Journal of Applied Psychology, as researchers are increasingly utilizing bootstrapping to test mediation with samples in this range. We discuss reasons to be concerned with this escalation, and in a simulation study focused specifically on this range of sample sizes, we demonstrate not only that bootstrapping has insufficient statistical power to provide a rigorous hypothesis test in most conditions but also that bootstrapping has a tendency to exhibit an inflated Type I error rate. We then extend our simulations to investigate an alternative empirical resampling method as well as a Bayesian approach and demonstrate that they exhibit comparable statistical power to bootstrapping in small samples without the associated inflated Type I error. Implications for researchers testing mediation hypotheses in small samples are presented. For researchers wishing to use these methods in their own research, we have provided R syntax in the online supplemental materials.

A quasi-experimental study of after-event reviews and leadership development.

We examine how structured reflection through after-event reviews (AERs) promotes experience-based leadership development and how people's prior experiences and personality attributes influence the impact of AERs on leadership development. We test our hypotheses in a time-lagged, quasi-experimental study that followed 173 research participants for 9 months and across 4 distinct developmental experiences. Findings indicate that AERs have a positive effect on leadership development, and this effect is accentuated when people are conscientious, open to experience, and emotionally stable and have a rich base of prior developmental experiences.

Team structure and regulatory focus: the impact of regulatory fit on team dynamic.

We report a within-teams experiment testing the effects of fit between team structure and regulatory task demands on task performance and satisfaction through average team member positive affect and helping behaviors. We used a completely crossed repeated-observations design in which 21 teams enacted 2 tasks with different regulatory focus characteristics (prevention and promotion) in 2 organizational structures (functional and divisional), resulting in 84 observations. Results suggested that salient regulatory demands inherent in the task interacted with structure to determine objective and subjective team-level outcomes, such that functional structures were best suited to (i.e., had best fit with) tasks with a prevention regulatory focus and divisional structures were best suited to tasks with a promotion regulatory focus. This contingency finding integrates regulatory focus and structural contingency theories, and extends them to the team level with implications for models of performance, satisfaction, and team dynamics.

Coordinated action in multiteam systems.

This study investigated coordinated action in multiteam systems employing 233 correspondent systems, comprising 3 highly specialized 6-person teams, that were engaged in an exercise that was simultaneously "laboratory-like" and "field-like." It enriches multiteam system theory through the combination of theoretical perspectives from the team and the large organization literatures, underscores the differential impact of large size and modular organization by specialization, and demonstrates that conventional wisdom regarding effective coordination in traditional teams and large organizations does not always transfer to multiteam systems. We empirically show that coordination enacted across team boundaries at the component team level can be detrimental to performance and that coordinated actions enacted by component team boundary spanners and system leadership positively impact system performance only when these actions are centered around the component team most critical to addressing the demands of the task environment.

Harmful help: the costs of backing-up behavior in teams.

Prior research on backing-up behavior has indicated that it is beneficial to teams (C. O. L. H. Porter, 2005; C. O. L. H. Porter et al., 2003). This literature has focused on how backing-up behavior aids backup recipients in tasks in which workload is unevenly distributed among team members. The authors of the present study examined different contexts of workload distribution and found that, in addition to the initial benefits to backup recipients, there are initial and subsequent costs. Backing-up behavior leads backup providers to neglect their own taskwork, especially when workload is evenly distributed. Team members who receive high amounts of backing-up behavior decrease their taskwork in a subsequent task, especially when a team member can observe their workload. These findings indicate that it is important to consider both the benefits and costs of engaging in backing-up behavior.

Trait configurations in self-managed teams: a conceptual examination of the use of seeding for maximizing and minimizing trait variance in teams.

In this article, the authors argue that there is no one best way to make placement decisions on self-managed teams. Drawing from theories of supplementary and complementary fit, they develop a conceptual model that suggests that (a) maximization principles should be applied to extroversion variance (i.e., complementary fit), (b) minimization principles should be applied to conscientiousness variance (i.e., supplementary fit), and (c) extroversion variance and conscientiousness variance interact to influence team performance. They also argue that previous research has underestimated the effect of extroversion and conscientiousness variance on performance because of suboptimal design. The authors, therefore, present an alternative method for making team placement decisions (i.e., seeding) that can be used to maximize or minimize variance in teams.

Statistical power and parameter stability when subjects are few and tests are many: comment on Peterson, Smith, Martorana, and Owens (2003).

Comments on the original article "The impact of chief executive officer personality on top management team dynamics: One mechanism by which leadership affects organizational performance", by R. S. Peterson et al.. This comment illustrates how small sample sizes, when combined with many statistical tests, can generate unstable parameter estimates and invalid inferences. Although statistical power for 1 test in a small-sample context is too low, the experimentwise power is often high when many tests are conducted, thus leading to Type I errors that will not replicate when retested. This comment's results show how radically the specific conclusions and inferences in R. S. Peterson, D. B. Smith, P. V. Martorana, and P. D. Owens's (2003) study changed with the inclusion or exclusion of 1 data point. When a more appropriate experimentwise statistical test was applied, the instability in the inferences was eliminated, but all the inferences become nonsignificant, thus changing the positive conclusions.

Teams in organizations: from input-process-output models to IMOI models.

This review examines research and theory relevant to work groups and teams typically embedded in organizations and existing over time, although many studies reviewed were conducted in other settings, including the laboratory. Research was organized around a two-dimensional system based on time and the nature of explanatory mechanisms that mediated between team inputs and outcomes. These mechanisms were affective, behavioral, cognitive, or some combination of the three. Recent theoretical and methodological work is discussed that has advanced our understanding of teams as complex, multilevel systems that function over time, tasks, and contexts. The state of both the empirical and theoretical work is compared as to its impact on present knowledge and future directions.

Team learning: collectively connecting the dots.

This article tests the degree to which personal and situational variables impact the acquisition of knowledge and skill within interactive project teams. On the basis of the literature regarding attentional capacity, constructive controversy, and truth-supported wins, the authors examined the effects of cognitive ability, workload distribution, Agreeableness, Openness to Experience, and structure on team learning. Results from 109 four-person project teams working on an interdependent command and control simulator indicated that teams learned more when composed of individuals who were high in cognitive ability and when the workload was distributed evenly. Conversely, team learning was negatively affected when teams were composed of individuals who were high in Agreeableness. Finally, teams using a paired structure learned more than teams structured either functionally or divisionally. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, as well as possible limitations and directions for future research.

Backing up behaviors in teams: the role of personality and legitimacy of need.

In this article, the authors developed several hypotheses regarding both the main and interactive effects of 2 types of team inputs on backing up behaviors in teams: (a) team composition characteristics in terms of the personality of the members of the team and (b) team task characteristics in terms of the extent to which the nature of the task is one that legitimately calls for some members of the team to back up other members of the team. Results from a study of 71 4-person teams performing a computerized tactical decision-making task suggest that the legitimacy of the need for back up has an important main effect on the extent to which team members provide assistance to and receive assistance from each other. In addition, the legitimacy of the need for back up also has important interactive effects with both the personality of the back up recipient and the personality of the back up providers on backing up behaviors in teams.

The Tripartite Model of Neuroticism and the suppression of depression and anxiety within an escalation of commitment dilemma.

We found evidence of a mutual suppression effect between anxiety and depression on an individual's level of commitment within escalation dilemmas. On the one hand, our results demonstrate a positive relationship between anxiety and level of commitment; on the other, our results demonstrate a negative relationship between depression and level of commitment. Based on the opposing relationships between anxiety and depression and commitment, the broad factor of neuroticism does not demonstrate any relationship with level of commitment, and the significant effects of anxiety and depression on commitment is contingent upon partialling the effect of the other facet of neuroticism. Thus, we contend that applied psychologists, who have focused on neuroticism as a broad construct, should consider the large body of work among clinical psychologists, who argue that anxiety and depression have unique variance associated with them. We conclude by addressing organizational implications of measuring the broad trait of neuroticism more narrowly.

Structural contingency theory and individual differences: examination of external and internal person-team fit.

This article develops and tests a structurally based, integrated theory of person-team fit. The theory developed is an extension of structural contingency theory and considers issues of external fit simultaneously with its examination of internal fit at the team level. Results from 80 teams working on an interdependent team task indicate that divisional structures demand high levels of cognitive ability on the part of teammembers. However, the advantages of high cognitive ability in divisional structures are neutralized when there is poor external fit between the structure and the environment. Instead, emotional stability becomes a critical factor among teammembers when a divisional structure is out of alignment with its environment. Individual differences seem to play little or no role in functional structures, regardless of the degree of external fit.

Computer-assisted communication and team decision-making performance: the moderating effect of openness to experience.

This study examined the effects of computer-assisted communication on team decision-making performance as a function of the team's openness to experience. Seventy-nine teams performing a multiple-cue probability learning task were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 experimental conditions: (a) verbal communication or (b) computer-assisted communication (which combined verbal and computerized communication). The results indicated that access to computer-assisted communication improved the decision-making performance of teams, but only when the teams were high in openness to experience. This effect was observed using both global openness and more specific openness facets, as well as a variety of team-level aggregation strategies. Moreover, the beneficial effects of openness in computer-assisted conditions were mediated by the efficiency with which teams integrated verbal and computerized forms of communication.

The Assessment of Goal Commitment: A Measurement Model Meta-Analysis.

Goals are central to current treatments of work motivation, and goal commitment is a critical construct in understanding the relationship between goals and performance. Inconsistency in the measurement of goal commitment hindered early research in this area but the nine-item, self-report scale developed by Hollenbeck, Williams, and Klein (1989b), and derivatives of that scale, have become the most commonly used measures of goal commitment. Despite this convergence, a few authors, based on small sample studies, have raised questions about the dimensionality of this measure. To address the conflicting recommendations in the literature regarding what items to use in assessing goal commitment, the current study combines the results of 17 independent samples and 2918 subjects to provide a more conclusive assessment by combining meta-analytic and multisample confirmatory factor analytic techniques. This effort reflects the first combined use of these techniques to test a measurement model and allowed for the creation of a database substantially larger than that of previously factor analyzed samples containing these scale items. By mitigating sampling error, the results clarified a number of debated issues that have arisen out of previous small sample factor analyses and revealed a five-item scale that is unidimensional and equivalent across measurement timing, goal origin, and task complexity. It is recommended that this five-item scale be used in future research assessing goal commitment. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.