The Clarity-Relationship Framework: relationship quality and clarity as interacting conditions for team goal achievement

The Clarity-Relationship Framework (CRF) is a conceptual model of team effectiveness. It crosses two conditions that decades of research have treated as parallel contributors — the quality of relationships inside a team (trust, psychological safety, open communication) and the team's clarity about its goals, roles and processes — and states their combination as a testable interaction rather than as an additive list. The paper does three things. It formalizes the interaction. The association of each condition with a team's goal achievement is argued to depend on the level of the other, so that teams high on both outperform what an additive combination of the two would predict (P1). Adjacent models contain both dimensions but treat them as correlated and additive; the CRF states the interaction in a form that can fail. It adds a level the team does not control. Organizational context clarity — how intelligibly strategy is communicated, how legible the criteria behind decisions and resource allocation are, how visibly a team's objectives connect to the organization's — is theorized as an antecedent of team clarity (P2a), as a condition on how far local achievement translates into organizational contribution (P2b), and as a bound on what the two team-level conditions can produce (P2c). Read from the performance measurement side, the third proposition restates a familiar sub-optimization problem as a condition on the team rather than a property of the measure. It publishes the means to test all of it. A 42-item diagnostic instrument with its scoring rules, a three-phase validation protocol with decision rules fixed in advance, and a power-analysis script that reproduces every figure reported in the paper. What this is not. The paper is conceptual and no data are analysed. Each proposition is stated with its formal statistical form and its falsifier, and the paper is explicit about what the programme it describes cannot settle. The confirmatory test of the central interaction requires a sample beyond that programme's reach. A decisive null result is further out of reach for a reason the paper sets out and the deposited script demonstrates: where an organizational bound is active, the observed interaction term is driven downwards, and can take the opposite sign, even when the interaction is real. The interaction is therefore testable in the positive direction only, until frontier estimation supplies a way to identify contexts that do not bind. Companion deposit. The instrument, its scoring rules and the power-analysis script are deposited separately and versioned independently: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21761691 Released under CC BY 4.0. Comments, criticism and collaboration are welcome; the validation programme described in Section 6 will not happen without collaborators. What changed in version 1.3. The organizational level is restated: what was a single organizational proposition is now three, and the two relationships this paper inherits from the literature — relationship quality and team clarity each relating positively to goal achievement — are stated as premises rather than as propositions the paper puts at risk, on a referee's advice. The falsifier for each proposition was rewritten so that it negates the proposition it belongs to. The power analysis reports point thresholds and labels its two unsourced inputs as assumptions. The masking of the interaction by an active bound, described above, was found while preparing the script for deposit and is new to this version. References follow Emerald Harvard. The accompanying instrument moves from CC BY-NC to CC BY 4.0: it may now be used, adapted and redistributed inside paid work, provided the source is attributed.