BUS603: Managing People

For group potency – and other emergent states – to develop, team members need time and a reason to interact and develop an understanding of "who they are" as a group. This suggests that potentially, at first, teams would be less confident in their ability to perform because they do not have enough experience with each other to develop a shared understanding of their collective ability. Then, conceivably, as team members interact over time they will gain insight into each member's work habits and abilities, leading to increases in collective confidence. This perspective, however, rests on the assumption that team members enter teams without any pre-existing expectations. It seems more likely that team members enter their teams with high expectations, optimism, and confidence, especially without evidence to suggest otherwise. In support of the latter, Allen and O'Neill theorized that the early agreement they found among team members on ratings of emergent states (e.g., group potency) might be attributed to an early positivity bias. They reasoned that this bias may lead to inflated perceptions of potency early in teams' lifecycle, indicating a strong need to consider the role of time in investigating team processes. Unfortunately, limited research has been conducted on the dynamic nature of group potency. One study, however, by Lester et al. measured group potency at two time points, and using differences scores found that group potency decreased over time. Although different scores have several methodological shortcomings, this finding is not overly surprising. In fact, research on the "better-than-average" effect – a common social comparison bias – would suggest that team members' initial expectations of their team's collective general ability might be inflated. The better-than-average effect has also been found to be stronger when the comparison target is ambiguous, as in a newly formed team might be, and is positively related to overconfidence in one's individual ability. It may therefore stand to reason that confidence in one's team may occur early in a team's lifecycle. Yet, as members may rate their team artificially high early on in their tenure, scores will tend to decrease over time as members interact with each other and face ongoing challenges with the task that may reduce their potency resources that are available for subsequent performance episodes. Continuing interactions and experience with the task may facilitate more realistic perceptions of how the team can reasonably be expected to perform (i.e., demonstrating a decreasing trend over time), in conjunction with increasing consensus across members. Together, this underscores the emergent and dynamic nature of potency. Based on this theorizing, the following is hypothesized:

To be clear, we suggest that the downward trend of group potency would be approximated well by a linear trajectory. Rather than a series of discrete step-wise drops, or patterns of punctuated change, we anticipate an incremental series of changes over time. Particularly, as teams meet on a set schedule during their lifecycle (i.e., three times a week during course and laboratory sessions) interacting with each other may lead to gradual changes in perceptions of group potency. Thus, rather than sudden, dramatic changes (i.e., discontinuous, non-linear change) in perceptions of group potency, teams will demonstrate a consistent, linear, downward pattern over time.