When Team Members Perceive Alike—Or Do Not: The Role of Dispersion in Social Emergent States for Team Performance

ABSTRACT Research on teams most often presumes that team members converge on a common view of their social environment, so empirical work has largely relied on mean‐level approaches to examine how social variables predict team performance. The present study posits that within‐team disparity in social emergent states provides important information beyond team mean levels by not only directly influencing team performance but also moderating the relationships of mean‐level social team aspects with leader‐rated team performance. In addition, we examined whether teams cluster into qualitatively different dispersion profiles. Data were collected from 838 employees nested within 156 teams. Results showed that the relative variance of psychological safety climate and the skewness of team trust were associated with leader‐rated team performance beyond mean‐level effects. Additionally, the relative variance of psychological safety climate and the skewness of distributive justice, as well as team trust, moderated the relationships with team performance. In particular, the positive relationships between these social emergent states and team performance were stronger when skewness was more negative. Moreover, hierarchical cluster analysis indicated distinct dispersion patterns consistent with existing theoretical assumptions, highlighting the importance of within‐team distributions for informing organizational interventions.