BUS603: Managing People

There are four intriguing findings from the current investigation that contribute to both the group potency and the multilevel emergence literatures. First, the latent growth model revealed a significant negative slope for group potency. Group potency levels therefore decreased over time, on average across teams. Previous research by Lester et al. also found a decrease in group potency over time; however, that study had only two time points and a much shorter time span in comparison to the current investigation (i.e., 9 weeks vs. 6 months, respectively). We theorized that individuals would general. As well, due to the "better-than-average" effect when teams first get together they may experience a "honeymoon period" where they have unrealistic positive expectations of how they will do as a group. Over time, it is probable that the honeymoon dissolves as team members spend more time interacting, debating, dealing with internal conflicts, and other challenges associated with teamwork and the team task. In this study, we drew upon COR theory to argue that these challenges negatively affect team resources (e.g., group potency), resulting in a decrease in magnitude over time. Interestingly, similar results have been found in other research domains. For example, in examining changes in organizational commitment, an integral workplace resource, Lance et al. and Bentein and Meyer found that organizational newcomers experienced loss of this resource over time as they interacted with their new settings. Our results, and those from the domain of organizational commitment, therefore support the argument that resources can be depleted over time as individuals interact with their environment, whether the environmental context is a workplace or a team. This suggests that early team experiences (i.e., socialization) are important for establishing strong, initial group potency resources.

This paved the way for the second intriguing finding from this study: in the latent growth model, teams' initial group potency predicted overall team effectiveness. This implies that, although group potency takes time to emerge (which we discuss subsequently), early interactions might play an important role in setting a team up for future success. Although teams may have elevated potency ratings during a honeymoon period, they are still able to effectively leverage their potency resources, such that it helps explain teams' effectiveness later on during project completion (i.e., 6 months later). This finding supports Kozlowski et al. argument that it is important to assess emergent states as early in a team's life-cycle as possible. Even though group potency resources may decrease over time, early potency, and the intra-team resources it provides, may have a role in determining future strategizing, planning, and cooperation, which helps to set the stage for the future goal and task accomplishment. Thus, despite the decreasing trend experienced by teams over time, what appears to be an important component of a team's effectiveness is each team's perception of potency early on in their respective lifecycle.

The third intriguing contribution that this research provides is that we documented an increase in consensus on group potency within teams. Thus, members gained an increasingly shared perception of their group's potency over time. This is an important aspect of what Kozlowski et al. described generally as exemplifying the multilevel emergence process: as team members interact they will develop a stronger, shared understanding of the team's emergent properties (e.g., group potency). Historically, "sharedness" or consensus has only been investigated using cross-sectional analyses, and inferred via ICC estimates, with "high values" taken to support the occurrence of emergence. This approach, however, does not facilitate an inference of the actual process of consensus emergence, which is temporally defined. Using Lang et al.'s methodology, we were able to utilize an analytical approach that is sensitive to emergence's inherently temporal nature and provide an empirical estimate of group potency's emergence. Commensurate with Allen and O'Neill, we found support for early emergence, with Time 1 ICCs meeting acceptable levels of agreement. Nevertheless, our findings also suggest that agreement still increased over longer durations as team members interact and get a better understanding of "who they are" as a collective.

Although the findings of decreasing group potency levels and increasing consensus on group potency may seem in opposition, these are independent phenomena. Conceivably, consensus could emerge over any level of a construct, which could be static or dynamic in nature. Future research may be able to leverage Lang et al.'s framework and incorporate predictors of emergence, such as relationship and process conflict, psychological safety, intrateam communication, and peer feedback, among others.

The fourth important finding reflects the application of the IPO framework to test key COR principles. More specifically, two input resources – conscientiousness and extraversion – were included as antecedents of group potency's dynamic nature. We found that the relation between conscientiousness and team effectiveness was mediated by initial group potency. Contrary to our expectations, no effect was found for extraversion, or for the link between conscientiousness and team effectiveness, as mediated by the rate of change in potency level. These findings suggest that teams that comprise individuals with higher levels of conscientiousness are more likely to get off to a "good start," and utilize their collective personality composition as a resource to develop higher levels of initial group potency (another resource), thereby leading to greater team effectiveness.