Analyzing the Effect of Team Structure on Team Performance: An Experimental and Computational Approach - eScholarship (2014)

Analyzing the Effect of Team Structure on Team Performance: An Experimental and Computational Approach Ut Na Sio and Kenneth Kotovsky Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA Jonathan Cagan Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA Abstract This paper investigates how team structure impacts team information processing and how this affects team resilience to change. Teams in three different subgrouping structures: homogeneous, heterogeneous, or no-clustering, were instructed to make decisions in which they had to evaluate different companies and pick the best one. Each member was told to evaluate the companies in a different way, creating teams with diverse perspectives. Partway through the experiment the problem evaluation criteria changed, but teams were not informed of the change, only whether their choice was correct. Teams with homogeneous-clustering were less capable than the other two types of teams in making use of multiple preferences and in dealing with changes. A similar effect was also found in computational simulations built from a PDP model. We suggest that heterogeneous-clustering can weaken members’ ownership and confirmation biases while no-clustering ensures a free flow of information, with both able to enhance team performance. Keywords: Team Structure; Team Diversity; Decision-Making; Computational Modeling Introduction Tasks organizations face usually require a breadth and depth of knowledge rarely found in one single individual, and bringing different experts to work together is viewed as one way for organizations to maintain a competitive edge. Yet, team diversity studies (van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007) revealed that cognitive heterogeneity does not always enhance team performance, depending on the quality of the team information processing. In this study, we look at how team structure affects the information processing within a diverse team, and in turn impacts performance, in particular in dynamic situations. Teams have been characterized as information processors, and the information processing involves activities that happen within and among the minds of team members The team-level processing involves the sharing of information between members, while the individual-level processing involves individuals’ evaluation and interpretation of the information shared by the others (Hinsz, Tindale, & Vollrath, 1997). Cognitive heterogeneity between members seems to affect these information processes positively and negatively. Diversity provokes social categorization that may damage team cohesion and information sharing. Individuals often place themselves and others into distinct subgroups based upon similarities between them (e.g., age, gender, educational background, and value). They tend to favor in-group members over out-group members. This intergroup bias may inhibit information sharing between dissimilar members (Cronin & Weingart, 2007). On the other hand, diversity helps reduce several information- processing biases. Individuals usually display an ownership bias, considering their own knowledge as more valid than those held by others. They tend to search and accept information supporting their preference than information opposing it. This is called confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998). The presence of diverse preferences could make members wonder about the accuracy of their responses and lower their confidence in the task, making them more open to different perspectives. Teams having members from varied disciplines are less subject to these cognitive biases than homogeneous teams (Schulz-Hardt, Jochims, & Frey, Team diversity research has focused on identifying under what conditions cognitive diversity is beneficial to team functioning and when it will become a disadvantage. Previously examined factors include the degree of diversity (Dahlin, Weingart, & Hinds, 2005), team size (Thornburg, 1991), and the presence of a leader (Kearney & Gebert, 2009). If team performance is a function of the range and depth of the information shared and processed within the team (Hinsz et al., 1997), then modifying the intra-team communication ties (e.g., who talks to whom, or who gives information to whom) should impact team performance. Only a few studies addressing this issue have been reported (Katz, Lazer, Arrow, & Contractor, 2004), and they mainly compared a centralized (i.e., decisions were made by a leader and information was sent upwards to the leader) and decentralized (i.e., having several individuals responsible for making decisions) structure, showing that a decentralized structure is beneficial when the tasks are novel and difficult. However, even in a decentralized team, there are still numbers of communication patterns a team could adopt, and each of them may impact the team differently. For example, creating communication ties between members from different backgrounds should promote cross- domain information sharing. Embracing the communication ties based upon homophily may result in in-group members validating each other, and making them more fixated on