Typology of Performance in Teams: The Structure of Team Effectiveness and Dysfunction

Date
2025-01-18
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Abstract

Effective team effectiveness is critical for organizations seeking to thrive in a competitive and dynamic environment, where collaborative efforts are increasingly integral to achieving strategic goals. While it is commonly believed that teamwork is on a spectrum of good to bad in team effectiveness criteria such as performance, viability, and well-being, this assumption has not been thoroughly tested. Questions remain about how these three outcomes interact and relate to each other, and whether there are trade-offs among these outcomes, such as high team performance at the cost of individual well-being. This study was conducted to explore these complexities by shifting the focus from viewing team effectiveness as a single, continuous outcome to examining distinct patterns of effectiveness within teams, where various outcomes coexist and influence each other. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to test five hypothesized team effectiveness profiles, followed by Multiple Logistic Regression (MLR) to examine how team conditions relate to profile membership. The analysis identified five distinct profiles: Thriving, Striving, Mediocre, Groupy, and Surviving, each showing unique patterns in Performance, Viability, and Well-being. The MLR results had one significant result, indicating 'Purpose' was more likely to belong to the highly effective (i.e., Thriving) profile compared to Mediocre teams. This research contributes to our understanding of team effectiveness by 1) challenging the traditional approach of examining team outcomes separately, proposing instead that these outcomes are multidimensional and interconnected, 2) building on the growing body of person-centered research in the teams literature, and 3) introducing a new taxonomy of team types, offering a practical framework for organizations to classify teams and enhance team effectiveness through targeted strategies.

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Keywords
field research, latent profile analysis, multiple logistic regression, organizational research, organizational teams, teams, person-centered research, performance, team-centered research, team dynamics, team effectiveness, team profiles, viability, well-being
Citation
Pezer, L. (2025). Typology of performance in teams: the structure of team effectiveness and dysfunction (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.