Modeling reciprocal team cohesion-performance relationships, as impacted by shared leadership and members' competence.

Despite the lengthy history of team cohesion-performance research, little is known about their reciprocal relationships over time. Using meta-analysis, we synthesize findings from 17 CLP design studies, and analyze their results using SEM. Results support that team cohesion and performance are related reciprocally with each other over time. We then used longitudinal data from 205 members of 57 student teams who competed in a complex business simulation over 10 weeks, to test: (a) whether team cohesion and performance were related reciprocally over multiple time periods, (b) the relative magnitude of those relationships, and (c) whether they were stable over time. We also considered the influence of team members' academic competence and degree of shared leadership on these dynamics. As anticipated, cohesion and performance were related positively, and reciprocally, over time. However, the cohesion → performance relationship was significantly higher than the performance → cohesion relationship. Moreover, the cohesion → performance relationship grew stronger over time whereas the performance → cohesion relationship remained fairly consistent over time. As expected, shared leadership related positively to team cohesion but not directly to their performance; whereas average team member academic competence related positively to team performance but was unrelated to team cohesion. Finally, we conducted and report a replication using a second sample of students competing in a business simulation. Our earlier substantive relationships were mostly replicated, and we illustrated the dynamic temporal properties of shared leadership. We discuss these findings in terms of theoretical importance, applied implications, and directions for future research.

Managing a new collaborative entity in business organizations: understanding organizational communities of practice effectiveness.

Companies worldwide are turning to organizational communities of practice (OCoPs) as vehicles to generate learning and enhance organizational performance. OCoPs are defined as groups of employees who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic and who strengthen their knowledge and expertise by interacting on a consistent basis. To date, OCoP research has drawn almost exclusively from the community of practice (CoP) literature, even though the organizational form of CoPs shares attributes of traditional CoPs and of organizational teams. Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) original theory of legitimate peripheral participation, we integrate theory and research from CoPs and organizational teams to develop and empirically examine a model of OCoP effectiveness that includes constructs such as leadership, empowerment, the structure of tasks, and OCoP relevance to organizational effectiveness. Using data from 32 OCoPs in a U.S.-based multinational mining and minerals processing firm, we found that external community leaders play an important role in enhancing OCoP empowerment, particularly to the extent that task interdependence is high. Empowerment, in turn, was positively related to OCoP effectiveness. We also found that OCoPs designated as "core" by the organization (e.g., working on critical issues) were more effective than those that were noncore. Task interdependence also was positively related to OCoP effectiveness. We provide scholars and practitioners with insights on how to effectively manage OCoPs in today's organizations.