Predicting Team Performance Over Time: A Secondary Data Analysis

Teams occupy a strong presence in the modern workplace. However, few studies have tracked the evolution of team behavior over time. The use of cross-sectional team research fails to appreciate the stages that teams pass through as they evolve and mature. The present study had three goals in mind. The first goal was to arrive at a causal model of team performance via a secondary statistical analysis on the research conducted by Cunningham (2001) and Strobel (2001). Strobe1 and Cunningham tracked the performance of eleven student-learning teams over the course of a semester. A team training intervention was administered after seven weeks. Contrary to their hypotheses, team performance declined post-intervention. Therefore, the second goal of the present study was to account for this decrement in team performance. The third goal was to examine the effect of the previously unresearched variable of task workload on the performance of these eleven teams. Results indicated that the same predictors did not come into play with all teams and thus, inconsistency existed across teams. Discussion focused on the implications of the results as well as the limitations and strengths of conducting time-based research.