Why and when hierarchy impacts team effectiveness: A meta-analytic integration.

Hierarchy has the potential to both benefit and harm team effectiveness. In this article, we meta-analytically investigate different explanations for why and when hierarchy helps or hurts team effectiveness, drawing on results from 54 prior studies (N = 13,914 teams). Our findings show that, on net, hierarchy negatively impacts team effectiveness (performance: ρ = -.08; viability: ρ = -.11), and that this effect is mediated by increased conflict-enabling states. Additionally, we show that the negative relationship between hierarchy and team performance is exacerbated by aspects of the team structure (i.e., membership instability, skill differentiation) and the hierarchy itself (i.e., mutability), which make hierarchical teams prone to conflict. The predictions regarding the positive effect of hierarchy on team performance as mediated by coordination-enabling processes, and the moderating roles of several aspects of team tasks (i.e., interdependence, complexity) and the hierarchy (i.e., form) were not supported, with the exception that task ambiguity enhanced the positive effects of hierarchy. Given that our findings largely support dysfunctional views on hierarchy, future research is needed to understand when and why hierarchy may be more likely to live up to its purported functional benefits. (PsycINFO Database Record

Trust and team performance: A meta-analysis of main effects, moderators, and covariates.

Cumulating evidence from 112 independent studies (N = 7,763 teams), we meta-analytically examine the fundamental questions of whether intrateam trust is positively related to team performance, and the conditions under which it is particularly important. We address these questions by analyzing the overall trust-performance relationship, assessing the robustness of this relationship by controlling for other relevant predictors and covariates, and examining how the strength of this relationship varies as a function of several moderating factors. Our findings confirm that intrateam trust is positively related to team performance, and has an above-average impact (ρ = .30). The covariate analyses show that this relationship holds after controlling for team trust in leader and past team performance, and across dimensions of trust (i.e., cognitive and affective). The moderator analyses indicate that the trust-performance relationship is contingent upon the level of task interdependence, authority differentiation, and skill differentiation in teams. Finally, we conducted preliminary analyses on several emerging issues in the literature regarding the conceptualization and measurement of trust and team performance (i.e., referent of intrateam trust, dimension of performance, performance objectivity). Together, our findings contribute to the literature by helping to (a) integrate the field of intrateam trust research, (b) resolve mixed findings regarding the trust-performance relationship, (c) overcome scholarly skepticism regarding the main effect of trust on team performance, and (d) identify the conditions under which trust is most important for team performance. (PsycINFO Database Record

Beyond shared perceptions of trust and monitoring in teams: implications of asymmetry and dissensus.

Past research has implicitly assumed that only mean levels of trust and monitoring in teams are critical for explaining their interrelations and their relationships with team performance. In this article, the authors argue that it is equally important to consider the dispersion in trust and monitoring that exists within teams. The authors introduce "trust asymmetry" and "monitoring dissensus" as critical dispersion properties of trust and monitoring and hypothesize that these moderate the relationships between mean monitoring, mean trust, and team performance. Data from a cross-lagged panel study and a partially lagged study support the hypotheses. The first study also offered support for an integrative model that includes mean and dispersion levels of both trust and monitoring. Overall, the studies provide a comprehensive and clear picture of how trust and monitoring emerge and function at the team level via mean and dispersion.